An Intimate Approach to Fairness, Impartiality and Reasonableness in Administrative Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is about the role of personal relationships in the theory and practice of administrative law. At first blush, attempting to link the notion of intimacy with the core doctrines of administrative law might appear an odd project. When administrative decision-makers and those affected by their decisions come together, it is typically for institutional, formal and legal reasons. The focus is not on a personal relationship between these individuals, but on the benefit or burden at issue. These are rarely ongoing relationships and may be completely anonymous (for example, where the decision-maker and the affected party can only identify each other by a reference number on a form). Occasionally, the administrative relationship is mediated by third parties, including social workers, doctors, lawyers, therapists, accountants and guardians, resulting in an administrative relationship with virtually no direct contact. This most impersonal of relationships is reinforced by an administrative culture (and a legal infrastructure) that esteems objectivity and detachment, and by a popular and political culture that portrays bureaucrats as remote, indolent, uncaring and often adversarial. In short, not only would most observers conclude that there is no possibility of intimacy in the administrative relationship, but most would also conclude that it would be far from desirable. In this paper, I argue that the context of remoteness, the alienation and the objectification that characterizes the present state of the administrative relationship has impoverished administrative law. The current ideal of the administrative relationship reflects the belief that bureaucrats must remain detached from the subject of their decision-making and the belief that citizens must not be dependent on the good graces of a particular decision-maker. In other words, the current ideal denies an inevitable and necessary element of humanity in the administrative decision-making process. My goal is to include the personal dimension to administrative relationships, and in doing so, recast the relationship as one of inter-dependency, capable of engendering mutual respect and trust.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".