Bibliographic record
Abstract
To describe an administrative decision as unreasonable tells us nothing of why the decision is unreasonable and provides no basis for judicial intervention. In this paper -- an unedited extract from chapter 4 of A Theory of Deference in Administrative Law -- I explain the reason and structure of reasonableness, or, in other words, the analytical structure of reasonableness review.The case law is (almost) resolutely opaque. Mysterious references by reviewing courts to multiple factors, judgment, and balancing are commonplace. Nonetheless, from a comparative analysis of American, Canadian and English decisions, certain indicia or badges of unreasonableness can be identified, for instance, illogicality, disproportionality, inconsistency with statute, and unexplained changes in policy.But establishing the presence of indicia or an indicium of unreasonableness will not automatically justify a reviewing court in quashing the impugned decision. The decision-maker may be able to explain how the decision is in fact justifiable, despite the presence of indicia of unreasonableness. However, once indicia of unreasonableness are identified, an onus, which might be described as a burden of justification, is then placed on the delegated decision-maker to demonstrate that the decision is not unreasonable, but justifiable. The burden is not placed on the decision-maker in a literal sense, in the way that the burden of proof might be shifted during a criminal or civil trial. Instead, the question for the reviewing court will be whether sufficient justification exists in the record, by reference to the cogency of the decision-maker’s reasons and reasoning and/or whether there was sufficient evidence before the decision-maker. Flowing underneath the reason and structure of unreasonableness are other sources of inspiration, such as the principles of good administration and the rule of law, from which the indicia of unreasonableness can be drawn. There is a deep normative well in which judges can find inspiration in developing the analytical structure of reasonableness review.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.053 | 0.117 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".