The Use of Legal Discretion: Perspectives from Law and Social Science

Abstract

Abstract Discretion is a central and inevitable part of the legal order. It is central to law because contemporary legal systems have come increasingly to rely on express grants of authority to legal and administrative officials to attain broad legislative purposes. It is inevitable because the translation of rule into action, the process by which abstraction becomes actuality, involves people in interpretation and choice. Law is fundamentally an interpretative enterprise in which discretionary behaviour is compelled by what Denis Galligan has neatly summarized as the ‘vagaries of language, the diversity of circumstances, and the indeterminacy of official purposes’ ( I 986a: I).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 92 citations exist upstream.