Law and Administration has never been simply a textbook of administrative law. As its title signifies, our primary objective in writing it was to further the study of law in the context of public administration and politics: the ‘law in context’ approach. We need to remind the contemporary reader that the first edition reflected an era of legal formalism when the study of case law, largely divorced from its social context, was seen as the be-all-and-end-all of legal studies. The formalist approach was reflected both in the dominant casebook method of teaching and the leading administrative law textbooks: de Smith's Judicial Review of Administrative Action — a title that speaks for itself — and Wade's Administrative Law, a slimmer version of the current well respected text. We saw formalism or legal positivism as largely obscuring both the plural character and the wide parameters of administrative law. Our preoccupations, spelled out clearly in the preface to the first edition, were ‘process’, ‘legitimacy’ ‘competency’ and a functionalist concern with effectiveness and efficiency. We made our points through lengthy case studies of administrative process, focusing especially on social security, immigration and planning law.

Our aim was to further a pluralist approach to the study of administrative law. Throughout our book we emphasised that public bodies possessed their own distinctive ethos, so too did the legal profession. Actors were also presented as individuals, holding different opinions and with differing styles; legal academics were likely to be similarly opinionated. We set out to convey this to our readers by allowing them so far as possible to speak in their own voices.