Responsive Legality

<p><em>Responsive Legality</em> is an important book about twenty first century justice. It explores the legal and moral values that twenty-first-century public officials use to make their decisions engaging existing theoretical models of administrative justice and updating them to reflect changed twenty-first-century conditions. Together these features of twenty-first century public administration are coined ‘responsive legality’. Whereas twentieth-century public officials were generally driven by their concern for bureaucratic rationality professional treatment moral judgement and – towards the end of the century – the logics of ‘new managerialism’ the twenty-first-century public official embodies greater complexity in their characteristic pursuit of substantive and procedural justice. In responsive legality government decision makers show a distinct concern for the protective parameters of the rule of law a purposive pursuit of fair outcomes and a commitment to flexible decision making. </p>