At present, much administrative law scholarship is broadly theoretical in nature and concerned with the common law principles of judicial review. In such a climate, it may be easy – at least easier than it once was – to fail to pay due attention to the role of practical experience and wisdom in constructing analyses of the wide range of mechanisms that constitute the UK's administrative justice system. The author of the book reviewed here – Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC – speaks as one of the most experienced voices on public inquiries, having been a practising advocate in many inquiries across the decades. In the book, he develops a complaint that public inquiries have, for much of their history, been conducted inappropriately. In particular, Blom-Cooper rails against attempts to recreate features of litigation within the public inquiry.

The book starts by looking at the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921, an Act that furnished public inquires with many court-like powers, such as the power to examine witnesses under oath. It goes on to discuss the Royal Commission on Tribunals of Inquiry – established in 1966 and heavily populated by members of the legal community – and its Six Cardinal Principles. The Principles sought to provide procedural safeguards in public inquiries, such as witnesses’ being given notice of any criticism to be made of them. Though the Principles had no legal force, Blom-Cooper notes how they were given “religious-like observance” and were “avidly seized on” by lawyers (p.23). As public inquiries were assimilated to judicial proceedings, Blom-Cooper argues, inquiries became increasingly expensive, costly, adversarial and infiltrated by lawyers. As the title of the book suggests, much of the focus of the author's critique is elaborated through a study of Lord Saville's Bloody Sunday Inquiry, which took over 12 years and cost over £200 million (some suggest the figure was much higher). For Blom-Cooper, the error of Lord Saville was that the Cardinal Principles were applied to their full extent such that the inquiry had all the trappings of a legal process: witnesses were provided with advance notice of any criticism of them, the assigning of blame superseded the learning of lessons, thoroughness was given primacy over efficacy, etc. The critique in the book then turns to a broad defence of the Inquires Act 2005 – a reform which, the author argues, goes a long way towards avoiding errors made in past inquiries. There is, however, still room for improvement according to Blom-Cooper. For instance, the author seems averse to any blurring of the judicial role with the role of chairing a public inquiry, and suggests that judges should rarely chair inquiries.

Simply to engage with the documented reflections of Blom-Cooper's experience makes this book worthwhile reading (though the uneven structure of the book makes it a bumpy read in places). While this book will appeal to those with a broad interest in public inquiries and those closely engaged with the development and operation of public inquiries, Blom-Cooper's study also speaks to a centrally important issue in contemporary administrative law: the role of law and judicial process in administration and administrative redress. This is a theme now attracting the attention of a growing number of scholars in the UK. Various developments such as the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998, the development of common law rights jurisprudence and the expansion of judicial review grounds have provoked this interest. While much of the debate has focused on legal principle and judging in the courts, Blom-Cooper's analysis of public inquiries reminds us that the effects of this trend on administrative law processes and redress outside the courtroom should also form part of the conversation. The book's content is, from this perspective, a rich body of material to inform discussion of that wider theme.

Is the author correct in his argument that public inquiries should avoid legalism? He certainly makes a strong case. Legalistic approaches have caused severe delays in public inquiries. Delays – and some other trappings and consequences of legalism – have increased expense in many instances. There are also good reasons to be cautious about judges' chairing enquiries, including that such a practice can pose serious questions of judicial independence and whether judges are equipped to go from adjudicating disputes in courts into a very different type of work in public affairs. These are all risks inherent in an approach of “aping the litigious purpose of adversarial claims” (p. xi) and these are all valuable points to make. Blom-Cooper describes these risks and makes these points well. The main problem with the author's argument, however, is that it seems to fail to account for what can be lost in moving away from legalism. For instance, if the author's argument is accepted, we can imagine less thorough inquiries than have been the norm. Thoroughness takes time and Lord Saville may have been too meticulous in the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, but the value of thoroughness in this setting should not be dismissed as quickly as Blom-Cooper dismisses it. This is just one example of Blom-Cooper's under-appreciation of the benefits that legalistic approaches do or could bring.

This reviewer would be more cautious than the author in asserting the primacy of one particular approach to public inquiries. Almost all legal and administrative institutions – including public inquiries – are placed under the competing demands of efficacy, responsiveness and coherence: G. Teubner, “Juridification: Concepts, Aspects, Limits, Solutions” in G. Teubner (ed.), Juridification of Social Spheres: A Comparative Analysis in the Areas of Labor, Corporate, Antitrust, and Social Welfare Law (1987). That is to say, citizens and others demand administrative systems to be successful in managing their role, responding to the public will and acting consistently with the basic normative commitments of society. As Teubner has demonstrated, any reform which aims to improve the performance of an administrative body or system in one of these three respects will almost certainly worsen performance in at least one of the other two. In this sense, analysing how institutions such as public inquiries work, and how they ought to work, is a “perpetually unsatisfactory project”: J.L. Mashaw, “Structuring a Dense Complexity: Accountability and the Project of Administrative Law” (2005) 5 Issues in Legal Scholarship 1, at 14. At the start of the book, the author quotes Sir Edward Heath's statement to Parliament concerning a possible review of the Government's action prior to the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands: “the plain fact is that we have never succeeded in finding the perfect form of inquiry”. It is hard to avoid the impression, looking at both the history of public inquires and the analysis in this book, that the reason is that no such thing exists. There is cause for caution before we accept that this book provides the firm answers that it suggests it does. This does not detract, however, from the fact that Blom-Cooper's study teaches us much about finding a way for public inquiries to, to borrow the phrase of Samuel Beckett, fail better.