LLM Group 1 Constitutional and Administrative Law Administrative Process Nature and Scope 2019 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: growth as a historical process in each of the three systems, with dates and causes, not a description of the present law; the common causes that produced administrative law everywhere; then each country in its own sequence, England from the prerogative writs to the Judicial Review and Courts Act, 2022, America from the first commission in 1887 to the overruling of Chevron in 2024, and India from the colonial administration through the Constitution to the present; and a comparative conclusion on why three systems that began in different places have arrived at similar doctrine. Cite case law throughout, as the paper's instructions require.

Stage two, Dicey's denial. In the Law of the Constitution (1885) Dicey asserted that England had no administrative law, because he equated the term with the French droit administratif and believed that system to be a body of privileges protecting officials from the ordinary courts. The denial was influential and wrong, and it delayed the systematic study of the subject in England by half a century.

Stage three, the growth of the administration and the alarm about it. The First World War, the Housing and Town Planning Acts and the social legislation of the 1920s transferred large powers to ministries. Lord Hewart's The New Despotism (1929) attacked the transfer, and the Committee on Ministers' Powers under Lord Donoughmore reported in 1932 with the answer that has held since: delegated legislation and administrative adjudication are inevitable, and the remedy is publication, scrutiny and judicial control.

Stage five, systematisation and the modern additions. Council of Civil Service Unions v. Minister for the Civil Service, [1985] AC 374 held prerogative power reviewable by subject matter and classified the grounds as illegality, irrationality and procedural impropriety. The Human Rights Act, 1998 added proportionality where a Convention right is engaged (R (Daly) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, [2001] UKHL 26), and the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act, 2007 unified the tribunal system. Most recently the courts have policed the executive more firmly, in R (Miller) v. The Prime Minister, [2019] UKSC 41 on prorogation and R (Privacy International) v. Investigatory Powers Tribunal, [2019] UKSC 22 on ouster clauses, and Parliament has responded with the Judicial Review and Courts Act, 2022. That last exchange is the whole meaning of parliamentary sovereignty in this field: the courts develop the law and the legislature has the last word.

United States of America

Stage one, the independent commission, 1887. The Interstate Commerce Commission, created to regulate railway rates, is the ancestor of the American regulatory agency: a body combining rulemaking, investigation and adjudication, insulated from the President by fixed terms.

Stage four, the due process revolution and the growth of deference. Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 US 254 (1970) held that welfare benefits could not be terminated without a prior evidentiary hearing, treating statutory entitlements as property for due process purposes, and Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 US 319 (1976) supplied the three-factor balancing test that decides how much process is due. In parallel, Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, 467 US 837 (1984) required courts to accept any reasonable agency reading of an ambiguous statute, and for forty years American administrative law was organised around that deference.

Stage five, the retreat from deference. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, decided 28 June 2024 by six to three, the Supreme Court overruled Chevron, holding that Section 706 of the Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise independent judgment on questions of statutory meaning, with agency views retaining only the persuasive weight of Skidmore v. Swift and Co., 323 US 134 (1944). It is the largest single change in the subject in any of these three countries in a generation.

Stage four, the transformation of the grounds of review between 1967 and 1978. S.G. Jaisinghani v. Union of India, AIR 1967 SC 1427 made the confinement of discretion a rule of law requirement. A.K. Kraipak v. Union of India, (1969) 2 SCC 262 dissolved the boundary between administrative and quasi-judicial action for the purposes of natural justice, holding the dividing line to be thin and being gradually obliterated. E.P. Royappa v. State of Tamil Nadu, (1974) 4 SCC 3 made arbitrariness a violation of Article 14. Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, (1978) 1 SCC 248 required procedure under Article 21 to be right, just and fair. In eleven years Indian administrative law acquired a standard that English law, lacking a written guarantee of equality, has never had.

Stage five, institutional expansion and its control. Tribunals were provided for by the Forty-second Amendment in 1976, and L. Chandra Kumar v. Union of India, (1997) 3 SCC 261 held judicial review under Articles 226, 227 and 32 to be part of the basic structure and tribunals to be supplemental and not substitutional. Liberalisation after 1991 produced the regulatory commissions. And the remedies expanded: Rudul Sah v. State of Bihar, (1983) 4 SCC 141, where a man was found in jail fourteen years after his acquittal, established compensation in public law, developed in Nilabati Behera v. State of Orissa, (1993) 2 SCC 746.

Conclusion. Three systems that began in three different places have arrived at recognisably the same subject, because the same cause operated in each: a State that grew until the ordinary law could not control it. England built the doctrine and never codified the procedure; America codified the procedure in 1946 and has spent eighty years arguing about how much the courts should defer, an argument it settled in the opposite direction in June 2024; India inherited England's doctrine, put it on a constitutional footing that neither of the others has, and added the one thing English law cannot supply, a written guarantee of equality that allows the rule itself to be struck down for arbitrariness. The Indian gap is equally clear from the comparison. India took England's judge made grounds and never took America's statute, so it has the strongest guarantee of review of the three and the weakest law of procedure.