Government contracts and the fettering of discretion - a question of validity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Government contracts have many special features that distinguish them from ordinary private law contracts. They differ from ordinary contracts with regard to the policies they aim to achieve; the importance, from a public interest point of view, of their subject matter; their need for flexibility and control; and simply the large amounts of public money involved. Unlike in the French system which has developed a 'public law' of contract or a special category of 'administrative contracts', government contracts in South Africa (also in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) are primarily governed by the 'private law' of contract. This creates an interesting tension, because certain special administrative law rules apply to the contractual capacity of public bodies that do not apply to private individuals. One such rule is that a public body cannot commit itself in advance, whether expressly or impliedly, to exercise discretionary powers in a certain way. The reasoning behind this rule is that if public bodies 'commit themselves in advance to acting in certain ways, this may prevent them from acting in the public interest in future'. Discretionary powers should always be exercised for the public good and should not be unduly limited or fettered. Public policy therefore demands that contracts that fetter the future exercise of discretion be declared invalid. Problems arise where there is a clash between a discretionary power and a contractual obligation entered into by the state with a private contracting party. Because contracts are by definition legally binding commitments, they often fetter freedom of action in some way. To what extent can a public body therefore commit itself for the future? In case of a clash between a discretionary power and a contractual obligation, will the latter be declared invalid and, if so, is the private individual entitled to compensation?
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".