When Efficiency Calls: Rethinking the Obligation to Provide Reasons for Administrative Decisions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been no shortage of commentary preaching the virtues of reasons. Even as administrative agencies strive to engage in efficient decision making, there is an expectation that a balance between that goal and aspects of procedural fairness will be maintained. In practical terms, however, preserving the ideal balance is becoming an increasingly challenging task. The author asserts that it is time to consider whether in modern administrative decision making, it is defensible to relax—if not eliminate—the duty to provide reasons in a wider range of situations. The article begins with an exploration of the evolution of administrative agencies’ duty to give reasons, in which the author tracks the Supreme Court of Canada’s progressive tolerance for deficient reasons over the last decade. The author then reviews traditional justifications for providing reasons and subsequently explores the tension between efficiency objectives and a desire for reasons of quality. The author argues that, despite the important role reasons play, mounting efficiency concerns ought to prompt the beginning of a discussion of whether acceptable alternatives to providing reasons for administrative decisions might exist. The author proposes a novel set of factors to guide determinations of when a duty to give reasons ought to apply, which includes a focus on the number of decision makers involved, and, potentially, the choice of individuals to waive their right to receive reasons. The author concludes that while some authors and judges remain understandably reluctant to adopt a more lenient approach toward the necessity and sufficiency of reasons, as both courts and administrative agencies continue to struggle with access to justice issues it may ultimately be seen as a necessary compromise.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".