PROCESS AND SUBSTANCE AS ASPECTS OF THE PUBLIC LAW FORM

I argue that process and substance are two aspects of the public law form and that the form conditions the content of the law. The reduction of a political programme to the explicit terms of a statute involves a conversion of policy into public standards, which produces a kind of legal surplus value. It brings into being a particular type of public standard - one that permits the operation of the principles identified by Lon L. Fuller as the desiderata of the inner morality of law, and which enables individual claims of right based on legal principle to be adjudicated.