This chapter complements Chapter 13 of Government Accountability: Australian Administrative Law, third edition. The cases extracted in this chapter illustrate the operation of limits on power that can be discerned from the statute conferring the power: misconceiving the nature or scope of the power, jurisdictional facts (both objective and subjective), procedural error, improper delegation, and mandatory and prohibited considerations. The cases in this chapter are worth studying both for their exposition of legal principles, and for the application of those principles to the facts. O’Reilly v Commissioners of the State Bank of Victoria, for example, is not only the leading Australian case on improper delegation, but also an excellent example of the reasoning process used to determine whether delegation is permissible in a particular situation. With one exception, the cases in this chapter are decisions of the High Court of Australia. The exception is Liversidge v Anderson – which is included because Lord Atkin’s dissenting judgment is one of the most celebrated administrative law judgments.

This chapter complements Chapter 13 of Government Accountability: Australian Administrative Law, third edition. The cases extracted in this chapter illustrate the operation of limits on power that can be discerned from the statute conferring the power: misconceiving the nature or scope of the power, jurisdictional facts (both objective and subjective), procedural error, improper delegation, and mandatory and prohibited considerations. The cases in this chapter are worth studying both for their exposition of legal principles, and for the application of those principles to the facts. O’Reilly v Commissioners of the State Bank of Victoria, for example, is not only the leading Australian case on improper delegation, but also an excellent example of the reasoning process used to determine whether delegation is permissible in a particular situation. With one exception, the cases in this chapter are decisions of the High Court of Australia. The exception is Liversidge v Anderson – which is included because Lord Atkin’s dissenting judgment is one of the most celebrated administrative law judgments.

New Dealers in the administration and on the Court were committed to the Progressive view of the relation between administrative agencies and the political branches-- as were, to a surprising degree, the Court’s more conservative members. Crowell v. Benson, which ardent New Dealers like Felix Frankfurter, lamented, actually went quite far in validating the Progressive theory of administrative agencies, though not as far as the most visionary proponents of the administrative state wanted.