Public law: a tool for modern management, not an impediment to reform

Abstract

In order to appreciate that public law is capable of operating as a tool for modern public management rather than an impediment to reform, it is necessary to overcome a series of confusions, clichés and misunderstandings relating to the very notions of law, public management and public law. A series of confusions and misunderstandings results as much from the multiplicity of meanings attached to the terms used, as from ignorance of the complexities of both practice and science. Misconceptions as to concepts assumed to be different on either side of the Channel or either side of the Atlantic must be identified and dismantled. If lawyers take the trouble to delve into what law is — and public law in particular — and if the permanent temptation on the part of conservative thinking of every kind to instrumentalize law, as a supposed obstacle to change, is countered, it is possible to demonstrate that, far from being an obstacle to the reform of the state, law — and public law in particular — is capable of providing a considerable incentive to modernization, of which it is an indispensable tool.