The grammar of administrative justice values

Abstract

The debate concerning administrative justice in the UK often involves reliance upon a certain set of values. Examples of such values include openness, confidentiality, timeliness, transparency, secrecy, fairness, efficiency, accountability, user-friendliness, consistency, participation, rationality and equal treatment. These values are often deployed, both in academic and policy contexts, without much precision. This produces confusion which can hamper debate. This article therefore argues there is a need to reflect on how these oft-used values are deployed, and consider the particular concerns which underlie them. In this sense, this article suggests there is a need to refine the grammar of administrative justice. This argument is demonstrated through an extended analysis of the value of ‘user-friendliness’: a site of emerging disagreement in recent years. It proposes that an important distinction must be drawn between two understandings of the value: the ‘accessibility’ and ‘consumerist’ understandings. This article concludes by suggesting that, going forward, it is important to consider whether the use of abstractions is helpful at all in administrative law and justice debates.

Keywords:

• Administrative justice
• administrative law
• public law
• values
• grammar
• rationalism
• abstraction
• user-focus

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Richard Kirkham and the anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. I am also thankful to discussants at the University of Edinburgh’s Constitutional Law Discussion Group – particularly Dr Christian Gill and Professor Chris Himsworth – for detailed comments on an early draft that I presented in November 2016. A later version of this paper was presented at the University of Oxford Public Law Discussion Group in January 2017, kindly organised by Ewan Smith. All views and any errors are my own.