The Constitutional Status of the Administrative State
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers the constitutional status of the administrative state. It argues that, after decades of growth in size, reach, and power, the administrative state can now be understood as an architectural feature of the Canadian constitution. To make this argument, the paper first provides an account of the concept of architecture in Canadian constitutional law and the analytical framework it offers for thinking through the status question. It then looks to developments in Canadian public law that shed light on the status of the administrative state. The analysis focuses on three such developments: the expansion of the role of administrative decision-makers to exercise constitutional jurisdiction and duties; the narrow limits on administrative jurisdiction and design, as facilitated through judicial interpretation of section 96 of the Constitution Act, 1867; and the well-established judicial posture of deference to administrative decision-makers. These developments not only reflect the essential role that administrative decision-makers have come to play in contemporary Canadian government, but also the impact of the administrative state on the constitutional position and responsibilities of the judiciary, the executive, and the legislature. With implications across regulatory sectors and branches of government, and in order to better understand the flattening structure of Canadian constitutionalism, this paper ultimately calls for a shift out of the paradigm of growth that has anchored much administrative law discourse and into a paradigm shaped by an interest in the status of the administrative state in the public order.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".