Writing in the early 1990s, a future High Court judge was blunt:

In concentrating heavily on doctrinal analysis, public lawyers had tended to assume two key elements of a classical ‘control’ model of judicial review: that government decision-makers and officials (a) take their lead from courts and not vice versa, and (b) that if proffered the bridle they dutifully put it on. Yet in showing that the administrative process was not, and could not be, a succession of justiciable controversies, de Smith's famous characterisation of judicial review as sporadic and peripheral had also yielded an important clue. The courts as machinery for redress of grievance might need to temper their approach in certain situations; administrative responses to judicial intervention would be many and various.

Stress is rightly laid on the expressive functions of judicial review, whereby — not least these days with Convention rights — certain key values about how public bodies should behave are embodied and proclaimed.