Legal foundations of public administration / by Donald D. Barry and Howard R. Whitcomb

The major objective of this book is to introduce students of public administration to a selection of important issues in administrative law. While the book may be used with profit by others, including law school students, it is intended primarily for those who have had little or no prior experience with legal analysis or the use of the case method. The treatment here is briefer by a considerable margin than that found in the typical administrative law casebook-textbook. As indicated, only a selection of important issues in administrative law is included, al though we consider these to be the issues of most importance to the present or future administrator. And these issues may not be treated as exhaustively as in the typical law school casebook: while a large number of recent cases and other up-to-date information will be found in the book, we do not consider it our primary function to set out for the reader "the law" as it has evolved in all of its particulars and in the most recent court opinions; rather, we are much more interested in making the administrator aware of the kinds of legal problems with which he or she is likely to be confronted. In a number of instances, therefore, we use one or two cases to illustrate the rather than discussing numerous cases in order to sketch the broad contours of the present law. Moreover, the analysis that follows largely excludes ques tions involving the technicalities of legal procedure. These are matters which would be better left to the attention of agency attorneys, on whom a publice official with competence in other areas of adminis tration will necessarily rely heavily when it comes to legal problems.

A significant portion of the text that follows has been written by the authors. The remainder includes a small number of excerpts from writings of other commentators and edited selections from some forty court cases. In our editing of these primary and secondary sources, we have selectively omitted statute and case citations, as well as footnotes. In these edited selections numbered footnotes are from the original materials and retain their original numbering: lettered footnotes are those added by the authors.

A number of people have provided important help to the authors in the writing of this book. The staff of the Linderman Library of Lehigh University helped in the location and acquisition of many of the sources we used. The secretaries in Lehigh's Department of Govern ment, Lois Brown and Dorothy Windish, handled the typing duties skillfully and cheerfully. The book is dedicated to two teachers of administrative law who stirred our interest in the subject and brought us to see it as an area of study to which all of those interested in the art of government should give attention.