Introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces the main argument of the book. It recognises that administrative justice and human rights are not commonly considered together. It suggests, however, that the ‘small places’ of daily life are where both concepts can be located in fruitful alliance. To achieve that alliance, it is necessary to recover the social democratic and post-war roots of administrative justice and human rights, and to trace the unravelling of that social democratic heritage by a dominant neoliberalism that has privileged the notions of individual ‘user’, ‘system’, and ‘closure’ as the settled orthodoxies. The chapter identifies the key role of ‘legalism’ in that process and recommends instead a ‘demosprudential’ future in which the concepts of ‘community’, ‘network’ and ‘openness’ emerge as alternative foundations.