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A recent biographer of Albert Venn Dicey states correctly and without qualification that his "Law of the Constitution has remained the most influential constitutional textbook of the last [19th] century" (Cosgrove, 1980, p. 113).1 Despite Dicey's prominence as a great British constitutional scholar, he seldom merits more than an obscure footnote in contemporary American legal textbooks. If his name appears at all, it is most likely found in administrative law literature, where he is summarily dismissed as a bookish exotic who "effectively interred the idea of administrative law in England by denying its existence" (Verkuil, 1986, pp. 685686).
It is true that Dicey did deny not only the existence but also even the possibility of administrative law in England and all other countries that follow English law, but this is not the whole truth. Dicey's position is richer and more complex than bald assertions of his rejection of administrative law might suggest. More important, a careful examination of Dicey's curious position on administrative law might help us understand the origins and peculiar nature of the advanced administrative state we find in the United Kingdom and the United States today. Consequently, I have divided this article into three sections. The first examines what Dicey actually had to say about administrative law. The second and third use Dicey's ideas to analyze certain trends in contemporary administrative law in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively.
I
Dicey's denial of the possibility of administrative law was not due to a failure to recognize the growth of administrative institutions in the world around him from 1885 to 1915, the years during which he worked on the first eight editions of his classic text. Rather, the denial flowed quite logically from his definition of law as "any rule which will be enforced by the courts" (Dicey, 1985, p. 40). Because administrative law is necessarily enforced by institutions other than a court, its status as law was doomed from the outset. This is why Dicey (1985) could assert so confidently that "the words `administrative law' are unknown to English judges and counsel, and are in themselves hardly intelligible without further explanation." Conceding that "administrative law" is the "most natural rendering" of the French droit administratif, he found this translation and...