There is a memorable line at the end of the film classic, Casablanca. It is spoken by the Prefect of Police, Captain Renaud, to his men just after Rick (Humphrey Bogart) has shot Colonel Strasser. He says: “Colonel Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects.” That rule or principle of action—of rounding up the usual suspects—writ large, captures the essence of the South African security system. The system may fairly be described as an elaborate mechanism designed to empower the security authorities to round up, or otherwise dispose of or deal with, suspects of their choice. The technique of empowerment is the conferment of statutory discretion upon some official or body to limit, suspend or terminate the basic liberties of any citizen or group of citizens. This discretion is usually couched in subjective terms.

The application for judicial review is the primary means of challenging the legality of action taken by public bodies. Judicial review is not, however, the only avenue by which an individual may challenge a particular decision. Statute may create an appellate machinery to hear appeals against decisions of public bodies. There is a wide variety in the pattern of such schemes. There may be an appeal from a decision to a tribunal or other body, with a further right of appeal on a point of law or by way of case stated to the High Court or the Court of Appeal. Such mechanisms exist in a number of fields, most importantly in the field of revenue law, enforcement notices in planning law, decisions of inferior courts such as magistrates& courts, and social security law. There may be an appeal from a decision to an administrative tribunal or inferior court but with no right of appeal to the High Court, as in certain immigration cases where decisions may be appealed to an adjudicator and from him to the Immigration Appeal Tribunal. There may be an appeal from decisions to an administrative body such as a Secretary of State either with provision for appeal to the courts, as with appeals against refusals of planning permission by local authorities, or without any further right of appeal, as in the case of appeals against disciplinary decisions of chief constables.

The relationship between the jurisdictions of local courts and central courts in late-medieval and early-modern England remains largely unexplored. It is nevertheless important to an understanding of the development of the common law, because of the prevailing notion that the great increase in litigation in the royal courts in the early Tudor period was connected with a decline in the use made of local courts. A massive transfer of business to the centralised royal courts might have affected the common law in ways other than the purely numerical, in that it could have brought a reception of legal ideas and remedies already well known out in the country. On that footing, the appearance of new kinds of action in the central courts at this period may represent transfers of jurisdiction rather than changes in legal thinking.

In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives was persuaded by a mathematician (of sorts) to entertain a bill “introducing a new mathematical truth”. The new truth was a method, or more precisely methods, for computing the value of π. Since π is a transcendental number the methods could at best have achieved an approximation. In fact they yielded several inaccurate values, one as wild as 4. The legislators were doubtful enough to refer the bill to a committee (the Committee on Canals) and, when this reported favourably, to the Committee on Temperance. Eventually they had the sense to defer it sine die.