The introduction to the book offers a short overview of the contents of the book. This book is a treatise on the executive branch, which addresses, theoretically and comparatively, the nature of the executive as a body that is the dominant player in the public and political sphere but is also required, under the separation of powers principle, to be subservient to the law made by legislature according to the constitution of a polity. Three arguments are made in the book. First, to grasp the nature of executive power, one should reject hierarchic accounts of the public sphere: searches for the wielder of the final word should be replaced by a model which rests on networks and inter-branch tensions. Secondly, under this ‘internal tension’ vision of constitutionalism, the executive branch is to be considered as concurrently subservient to law and dominant over it. Finally, much of public law is shaped in ways that enable this seeming contradiction. The thirteen forms of ‘fuzzy’ law presented in the book, generated by constitutions, legislators, and executives, enable the executive to act relatively unfettered without losing the legitimacy arising from the existence of formal law, which, in effect, sets limited constraints on executive action. Ranging from open-ended or semi-written constitutions to unapplied legislation, these forms of legality span both constitutional and administrative aspects of public law. The introduction briefly discusses the structure of the book, which is divided into four parts.
