[Book review]: 'Reimagining Administrative Justice: Human Rights in Small Places' by Margaret Doyle & Nick O'Brien (Palgrave Pivot, 2020)

Reimagining Administrative Justice: Human Rights in Small Places, Margaret Doyle and Nick O’Brien present us with what they describe in the book’s preface as "an intellectual challenge to settled thinking", a "constructive, perhaps unexpected, vision" (p.vii) of what administrative justice could and should look like. Administrative justice, they suggest, is intimately tied to human rights: "It is in the small places of ordinary daily life … that human rights and administrative justice matter most, and where they share common roots as a political response to the post-war social democratic moment." (p.2) Both concepts, however, have lost sight of their original and connected animating purposes, they argue. In this book, the authors aim to "reunite" (p.3) them in a single frame that can return administrative justice to its potential for enhanced social justice. So, what went wrong with administrative justice and human rights? What untethered them from their foundations?