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Introduction: The 'problem of reconciling' John Willis's 1933 classic, The Parliamentary Powers of the English Government Departments, is essential reading to any historian interested in the debates over legislative delegation and administrative justice in inter-war England.1 The book's immediate purpose was to respond to the assertions made by Lord Hewart, the Lord Chief Justice of England, in his notorious polemic, The New Despotism, published in 1929.2 Hewart argued, very much in a Diceyan vein, that the emergent administrative state was a perversion of the most venerable principles of the English constitution, notably parliamentary sovereignty and the 'Rule of Law' as enforced by the ordinary common law courts. Hewart asserted that, particularly during and after World War I, Parliament was using its undisputed sovereignty to make wholesale shifts of legislative authority outside the parliamentary realm and then, through a variety of statutory mechanisms, to deprive the ordinary courts of their rightful jurisdiction over the lawful exercise of that authority. The effect was to undermine the rule of law that had been a cornerstone of the English constitution since the seventeenth century. In Parliamentary Powers, Willis counters that the administrative state in England has a historical pedigree and underlying normative justification of its own, one very different from the Diceyan constitutionalism of Hewart. Administrative structures did not suddenly emerge during World War I or after; rather, they were the product of '[a] long period of imperceptible growth' in the nineteenth century, which was followed in the early twentieth century by 'a quickening to meet the needs of the new Social State' and then by 'a sudden flowering during the War, and after the War the full fruition.....3 The method that Parliament 'invariably [End Page 657] followed' in delegating legislative and adjudicative powers to the government departments was, according to Willis, functionalist: Parliament viewed the task of apportioning power as 'neither one of law nor of formal logic, but of expediency.'4 Parliament assigned authority 'to the body which experience has shown best fitted to perform the work' in question.5 Little or no regard was given to whether this allocation of authority transgressed traditional constitutional boundaries between legislative, executive, and judicial powers. In analysing the modern administrative state from a functionalist perspective, the young Willis associated himself with a broader scholarly movement in inter-war England (whose leaders included Harold Laski, William Robson, and Ivor Jennings) that had assembled to counter attacks on administrative governance from the bench.6 Functionalists set out to explain and justify the modern administrative state to a sometimes sceptical English public, while also noting that the public's demands for greater state intervention had given rise to the functionalist expansion of administrative structures in the first place.7 The appearance of Parliamentary Powers simply marked the entry of a new and vigorous voice into this highly charged legal–political discussion. However, soon after the book appeared, Willis was (as Michael Taggart so nicely puts it in his contribution to this volume) 'lost to England.'8 Following the two-year research stint at Harvard during which he completed Parliamentary Powers (under the supervision of Felix Frankfurter), a variety of circumstances took Willis to Canada and kept him there for the rest of his life. Canadian public law scholarship was, of course, all the richer for it (as is fittingly commemorated by this volume and the conference that gave rise to it). [End Page 658] But as Martin Loughlin remarked at the conference, it is impossible to understand Willis without recognizing that he remained, first and foremost, 'an Englishman' throughout his life. Willis may have been 'lost to England' by his move to Canada, but England was certainly not lost to Willis, at least not in a scholarly sense. His writings in Canada reflect an abiding interest in...
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