About the Book:This book casts a spotlight on a vital but poorly understood feature of the political process: the functioning within government of the public law rules that define and constrain it. Drawing on rich source material-one local authority’s involvement in the epic central/local confrontation over local government spending in 1980s England-the book develops a multifaceted, timeless and widely applicable analysis of public law within government as a process of “sustaining the art of the possible.”