Law as Last Resort
Prosecution Decision-Making in a Regulatory Agency
Keith Hawkins
Reviews and Awards
"... a fascinating and sometimes compelling book ... the book's interest and importance is its enormous scope ... The material and analysis in this book will be useful across a range of fields of study ... raises important questions about sovereignty, and about the formulation and transmission of policies that have such an important public impact." - Legal Studies
"This book is the culmination of nearly twenty years' work on the enforcement of health and safety regulation in the United Kingdom. It is also theoretically and analytically a highly sophisticated study of legal decision-making which deserves to be widely read by lawyers and regulationists alike." - Law Quarterly Review
"The wealth of empirical detail permits a fine-grained analysis, and the time-span facilitates some generalisations about the nature of enforcement processes ... The most notable advance, however, is the development of a sophisticated and nuanced theoretical framework for analysing decision making in enforcement." - Law Quarterly Review
"Hawkins has used his extensive empirical material well ... the analytical framework is sophisticated and well nuanced and the argument clearly and powerfully expressed. Hawkins set the standard for enforcement studies in 1984: this book sets it again only at a much higher level." - Law Quarterly Review
"This is an impressive book, providing a fascinating account of the decision-making process within an orginization which must satisfy different and sometimes competing demands, demonstrating the ways in which HSE inspectors move between their roles as regulators, enforcers, and prosecutors." - Journal of Law and Society
"This is an excellent "interpretive" socio-legal study of the prosecutorial decision-making by the officers in the British Health and Safety Executive ... the book does draw conclusions about how legal officials actually make decisions, and these insights will be of great interest to policy makers." - Regulation at Work
