Draft:Administrative Justice

Administrative Justice is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that is concerned with the philosophical, social scientific and practical applications of justice, or fairness, by government.

It has its foundations in a range of disciplines including political science, socio-legal studies and law and society scholarship.

Where administrative law is most concerned with how government agencies are required to operate within technical national and international legal regimes, administrative justice has as its core the questions of how government agencies do and should operate in order to produce good processes and outcomes for citizens.

Influential and instructive works in the field of administrative justice span across many nations but derive particularly from the USA, UK and Australia. In the USA Jerry Mashaw's work on Bureaucratic Justice provides a pioneering account of the role of administrative justice in twentieth century decision making through an analysis of the US Developmental Disabilities Administration (DDA). The work presents core modes of administrative justice under the concepts of bureaucratic rationality, professional treatment and moral judgement, positing that bureaucracies operate generally according to one of the three models at any given time but with bureaucratic rationality being the main modus operandi of the twentieth century. Michael Adler's empirical work from 1988-2003 in the UK adds three additional categories of managerial, consumerist and market and recategorises Mashaw's modes as ideal types that exist as broad analytical thought experiments, drawing on Max Weber's influential social scientific methodology.

Moving from the twentieth century into the twenty first, Zach Richards coins the term 'responsive legality' to encompass the range of features that typify administrative justice in contemporary public administration. Drawing on a core case study in the Refugee Review Tribunal of Australia (RRT) and the broader law and society scholarship, Richards finds that twenty first century public administrators are driven by four key elements: responsiveness, substantive and procedural fairness, experientially based truth verification and protecting welfare through the rule of law. When all four of these elements are at play, the contemporary public official and government agency embodies a greater sense of overall justice than what was typically the case in bureaucratically oriented twentieth century administration.