Preface
For many years, ‘accountability’ has been a central term in public and academic debate about the constitutional arrangements of the United Kingdom and other comparable democratic societies.
While many high quality academic analyses of the notion of accountability have appeared in particular contexts, the genesis of the present collection of essays lay in a view that the time was ripe to set out a range of informed contributions to debate about the role played by accountability-related ideas in contemporary constitutional law.Apart from thanking our contributors, we owe a debt of thanks to many people for their support for this project. At OUP, we extend our thanks to Alex Flach, Natasha Fleming, Clare Kennedy, John Britto Stephen and those involved in editorial and production tasks associated with the book. Thanks are also due to Breony Allen and Jack Bradley-Seddon for their work on the indexing. Gordon Anthony, Carol Harlow, Rick Rawlings and Andrew Harding generously offered helpful advice at many points during work on the project, and Aileen Kavanagh and Cheryl Saunders made useful contributions at an early stage. We would also like to acknowledge the help of Sebastian Payne and Colin Scott.
Thanks are also due to Professor Robert McKeever, Claire Keefe and Lucy Hall for their assistance with a workshop involving many of those associated with the project and held at London Metropolitan University in September 2010. We would also like to acknowledge the support provided by the Oxford University Law faculty in relation to the production of the book.
Finally, both of us would like to extend special thanks to Putachad who interpreted our arguments and debates about the project to create her wonderfully evocative cover design for this volume.
Nicholas Bamforth and Peter Leyland August 2013