Normative decisions are made at the summit of the state, in a process that itself entails significant political negotiation between public and private interests. However, once those general policy directions are determined, the difficult work of negotiation then shifts to the administrative sphere. The sphere of administrative law is where ‘the rubber meets the road’ in the modern state. It is the point of contact between state and society where efforts to implement specific legislative goals generate the ‘friction’ of social and political resistance. As part of the effort to reduce or override that resistance, legislative norms are often redirected in number of ways and the role of administration in this regard is very significant. In the England, after an initial attempt at judicialization in the 17th century had failed (due to the Parliament’s successful assertion of supremacy over the crown culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1688), it would return over the course of the 19th century, albeit sub silencio in tribute to the strength of the prevailing Rule-of-Law culture. By the early-20th century, with the dramatic expansion of the regulatory capabilities of the state, the ordinary English courts became more aware of the new reality and began to vigorously contest the preclusion of judicial review of administrative action. Ultimately, in the decade after World War II, English judges were forced to accept the reality of separate forms of administrative justice, but only after Parliament inscribed in law the general right of appeal to the judicial courts in administrative disputes. Thus the essence of the old Rule-of- Law system was seemingly retained.

In French history, the detachment of state administration from judicial oversight was central to the political effort from the 17th to the 19th centuries to make the state a more effective agent for the construction of a national market economy and a cohesive national political community (both of which French elites regarded as essential to the projection of state power on the international level, particularly in competition with the British and later, the Germans).