A pragmatist approach to the administrative state: A new interpretation of John Willis’s ‘three approaches to administrative law’
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I offer an alternative interpretation of John Willis’s article ‘Three Approaches to Administrative Law: The Judicial, the Conceptual, and the Functional,’ published in the University of Toronto Law Journal in 1935. While celebrated as one of the founding fathers of Canadian administrative law, Willis has also been heavily criticized for his strong opposition to judicial review of administrative action. These criticisms, however, seem less pressing if his proposal for a functionalist approach to administrative law can be reinterpreted as being aligned with the American pragmatist tradition. According to this reinterpretation, I look back to argue that the philosophical assumptions of this school of thought can shed new light on Willis’s resistance to judicial review at the time of his writing. Then I look forward to claim that, if we reinterpret Willis’s proposal according to philosophical pragmatism’s assumptions, a functionalist approach to administrative law seems very much in line with Canadian administrative law today.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 it