he has undoubtedly helped to fortify its already substantial reputation for fairness and efficiency . the position can , however , best be assessed by my readers for themselves through my giving them some instances of the Danish Ombudsman &apos;s activities in the sphere of his individual grievance work . in its summer issue of 1959 the journal public law published an article by Miss I M Pedersen , a Danish civil servant , in which a detailed analysis of this aspect of the Ombudsman &apos;s work is attempted . the picture which this article gives is so clear and convincing that I am inserting it as an appendix . I shall confine myself here to describing one or two outstanding cases . one of these was a complaint addressed to the Ombudsman by a bookseller , who held that he had been penalized by publicity given by the police to a charge brought against him for defrauding his creditors . on investigation , it proved that his wife from whom he was separated had been summoned to give evidence against him and that she had been sent copies of the summons , which revealed the nature of the alleged offence , to relations who thereupon stopped giving him financial assistance . the Ombudsman recommended that in future summonses to witnesses should not show the nature of the offence about to be tried and this recommendation has been embodied in law . in the course of another inquiry the Ombudsman revealed that the Danish ministry of agriculture had been acting ultra vires in a certain matter for some twenty years . his activities have likewise embraced such varying subjects as the right of certified mental patients to have their consent asked before a leucotomy is performed on them and a complaint against the Copenhagen police for alleged aggressive action over a car licensing offence . equally , various other matters , such as the calculation of damages in cases of disablement , have been found to be beyond his practical competence . there is no doubt that much of the success of the institution of Ombudsman has derived from the skill and high reputation of Professor Hurwitz , Denmark &apos;s first Ombudsman . in a country where academic qualifications are highly valued , his distinction as a professor of criminal science has stood him in good stead . in Britain , where high academic appointments are not normally regarded as proof of administrative or judicial wisdom , and where even the existence of criminal science is a matter of dispute , Professor Hurwitz &apos; success might have been less outstanding . here we should look to a judge or a retired and senior Treasury official , or to parliament , to provide such services if they are required . what matters is that Denmark appears to have found a way of satisfying what is prima facie a legitimate public demand for protection against administrative abuse without either paralysing administration or diminishing the dignity and independence of the judicature . this , to say the least , is a constitutional example worthy of scrutiny in the context of other political and social circumstances which , however , include the tendency towards ever-increasing administration noted by the advocates of the Ombudsman in post-war Denmark . already , however , words have been used in this exposition which demand much closer analysis . the respective spheres of justice and administration , the precise difference between judicial and executive acts , the relationship of the legislature to these other two branches of government , and in particular the implications of the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty cherished in Britain , are all matters which must be examined more thoroughly before the relevance of the Danish institution of the Ombudsman for this country &apos;s affairs can begin to be judged . chapter two . legality or justice . it is often said that in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century there were three competitors to sovereignty , King , parliament and the judges . after a while , the judges withdrew from the contest and King and parliament were left to fight it out between themselves . the withdrawal of the judges was a crucial event , for it imparted to the British system of government what has ever since remained , at any rate in form , its dominant characteristic , the institution of parliamentary sovereignty . the doctrine that parliament is legally entitled to do whatever it chooses , that it is the final authority before which all others must bow , now has general acceptance here . it is not so elsewhere . other countries , in particular the United States of America , have sought to guarantee liberty by laying down a fundamental law and entrusting its guardianship to a supreme court . they have sought still further to guarantee this system of law by a strict separation and balance of powers between the executive and the legislature . in Britain , on the other hand , it has been assumed that the welfare of society demands the unquestioning and habitual acceptance of the supremacy of parliament , a parliament which can not limit its own competence and can not bind its successors . no doubt it was in the seventeenth century that the decisive steps in this direction were taken , but it would be a mistake to read into the constitutional debates of those days the modern conception of parliamentary sovereignty which grew out of them . the truth is that all three participants in the constitutional conflicts of Stuart times in some degree accepted the notion of fundamental law and were largely ignorant of the notion of sovereignty as it was later formulated . King , judges and parliament , in debating such matters as who had the right to impose taxes , all appealed to an ill-defined system of customs and principles which they assumed to constitute the immemorial law of the land . the notion that government existed to safeguard and interpret this law was common to all of them . there was indeed no clear distinction between legislation and adjudication . officially , parliament , though it is normally regarded as the legislator today , is still designated as a high court . its procedure still bears many of the marks of its origin as a place where private grievances are aired and remedied . the very word enact strictly means interpret , and the notion of law making as a creative process is something very novel indeed . down to the nineteenth century , the idea of the House of Commons as an institution existing mainly for the defence and adjustment of private rights was dominant . the great part of the business of the eighteenth-century House of Commons concerned private and indeed intimate affairs . if a man wanted to enclose a piece of common land he could do so only by virtue of a private act of parliament ; if a man wanted a divorce he could get it only by means of such an act . the procedure for private bills still had an important place in the business of parliament down to the beginning of this century . much of what is now done by administrative act used to be accomplished in this way . for instance , compulsory acquisition of land for such purposes as the building of railways in the last century was brought about by private acts of parliament . a bill would be prepared by a member and , when it came up for parliamentary consideration , interested parties would send their lawyers to the bar of the House to plead their cause . no branch of the bar was more profitable or a quicker highroad to success until quite recent times than this parliamentary work . the most characteristic defence of the complicated and irrational franchise on which the Commons was elected before 1832 was that , for all its irregularities , it produced an assembly well fitted to discharge the essential business of parliament as it was then conceived , the guaranteeing of private rights . it was an assembly , the argument ran , where a man might plead his grievance in the knowledge that it would be listened to by representatives of every considerable interest in the land , and in the hope that the conclusion which would emerge would represent something like the national view of commonsense in the matter . from 1832 onwards , however , this character has been radically changed . the procedure for private bills is virtually extinct , though there are some instances of its use , as in the recent case of the Esso petroleum bill , when a private company sought powers of compulsory purchase . it may now be safely said , with certain qualifications regarding question time and adjournment debates , that the primary business of the Commons has ceased to be the rectification of private grievances and has become the enactment of public legislation . large and highly disciplined parties emerged with organised followings in the country , so that it is only on a minority of issues that the House of Commons can formulate an independent view . indeed , the best contemporary exponents of the constitution , like Sir Ivor Jennings , have no hesitation in holding that the real business of parliament is to sustain government in office . public interest has largely shifted away from Westminster to the party conferences and the private conclaves of parliamentary parties , each of which is supported by a highly developed bureaucracy . it is at these places , after all , that things really happen , that general plans of future legislation are formulated , subsequently to be embodied in election programmes . a victorious party at an election tends to assume , often with little justification , that it has been authorised to carry out in detail the measures listed in its programme , measures conceived by party bureaucrats , born at party conferences and designed less to reflect the will of members of parliament or even that of the country at large than to appease the party zealots . these changes in the functioning of parliament have of course been accompanied by similar changes in constitutional theory . the constitution is no longer conceived as a system of private rights and legislation is now regarded as a dynamic , not an interpretative , process . the legislator &apos;s task is conceived as being that of formulating general laws for the good of society rather than that of adjusting private interests . inevitably , of course , highly organised interests within society have a great and , some would say , a growing influence on law , but , even in the case of the trade unions with their substantial representation in the Commons , it is an influence which is commonly exercised outside parliament . the delicate balances between different religious denominations embodied in the Butler education act , for instance , were the result of prolonged diplomacy exercised by the Minister before the bill was prepared . almost all acts of parliament today are preceded by negotiations of this kind , but the theory of the legislative process takes no account of these pressures . the doctrine is that a parliament representing the general will formulates general rules for society at large . the generality of the rules is indeed inevitable as a result of the complexity of the matters with which contemporary legislation deals and the numbers of those affected by it , but it is also increasingly assumed to be a necessary consequence of the rule of law . if the legislator addresses himself with particularity to the interests of this or that man or group his perception of the social good , it is believed , will perforce be corrupted . obviously , however , nothing could be further removed from the tradition of parliamentary government which had been handed down to our early Victorian ancestors than the principle of the necessary generality of the process of lawmaking . now , in whatever way government may be theoretically conceived , it is in practice a matter of the adjustment of a multiplicity of private interests . if the function of an act of parliament is to establish general principles and rules , the details must be filled in by someone , and it is to the civil service that the task of filling in these gaps has fallen in modern times . over the last half-century parliament has perforce delegated to Ministers and to subordinate organs of the executive the task of devising the measures needed to achieve the objects of its legislation , and the measures thus devised , although they have lacked the direct consent of parliament , have been endowed with all the force of statutes . some of these decrees have themselves been very general in character , and the machinery for reviewing them in parliament has often been highly inadequate . 