Can administrative law achieve any ideal of social justice? The answer is perhaps yes. But there is nothing built-in the system to encourage this result. For that reason, deference to administrators because of the political aims they might pursue is a week reed on which to rest a more general case for deference.
This much was made clear to me when I read a recent piece by perhaps the most revered administrative law scholar in Canadian history, John Willis. Celebrated in the academy, Willis is best known for his piece on administrative law functionalism (John Willis, “Three Approaches to Administrative Law: The Judicial, The Conceptual, and the Functional” (1935) 1 U.T.L.J. 53), laying out his view of administrative law as a body of law that should charitable to the aims and expertise of administrators—fundamentally, in their good-will as holders of the public trust, and in their ability to deliver impartial, efficient justice relative to the courts. The idea was that courts should defer to administrators for this reason. Willis was at heart a social democrat, as noted in this paper sketching an intellectual history of administrative law in Canada. The underlying philosophy was a belief in government, in contrast to a belief in judges, who were said to stultify the development of the social welfare state in favour of the common law. Indeed, Willis self-described himself as a “government man.”
The administrative law functionalists were politically-minded people, advancing a political agenda against the common law judges. But their argument for deference was also admittedly political. Says Michael Taggart (at 257):
These left-leaning scholars were deeply resentful of what they saw as conservative judges twisting the pliable rules of statutory interpretation to favour the existing order, privileging the rich and the powerful, and defeating the purposes of statutes intended to further the interests of the workers, the homeless, and the least well-off in society.
One might see, here, a commitment to social justice broadly conceived. But the functionalists, and the way they taught us to think about administrative law, had significant blindspots, in an ideological sense. Not all causes were equally represented in their social justice mindset. Read, for example, this quote by Willis in his “Administrative Law in Retrospect” at 227, in which Willis decries growing trends to subject the administrative process to norms of transparency and accountability:
I am thinking particularly of a number of currently fashionable cults and the damage they may do to effective government if they are allowed to infiltrate too deeply into the procedural part of administrative law: the cult of ‘the individual’ and claims by prisoners in penitentiaries, complaining of their treatment there or applying for parole, to a formal ‘right to be heard’; the cult of ‘openness’ and claims by the press to the right to dig into confidential government files; the cult of ‘participatory democracy’ and claims by ‘concerned’ busybodies to the right to be allowed to take court proceedings to curb, say, alleged illegal pollution or alleged dereliction of duty by the police.
One need not belabour the point; to the extent Willis is representative of a functionalist mindset, the commitment to social justice only went as far as required to protect the prerogatives of government. This is an empty form of social justice, one more attuned to the preservation of government as a functioning institution than the use of government to achieve outcomes that improve social welfare. This might be a legitimate aim, though one should wonder why courts should have any involvement in propping up modern government. But let’s not pretend it is an ideal vision of social justice.
What’s more, the vision ended up being remarkably short-sighted. Nowadays, the administrative state is most problematic in areas which affect the least well-off, including those that Willis slagged in his article: prisoners, those suffering from pollution, immigrants and refugees, and social assistance recipients. How can a broader theory of delegation to administrators, based on the relative conservatism of courts, miss out on all of these people?
This illustrates a broader point, about which the real functionalist motivations shed light. Delegation to administrators, no matter the substantive or pragmatic justifications for it, is about power. Whether it is a delegation of legislative power, an executive power of appointment, or otherwise—delegation is about a transfer of a power from one entity to another. In this case, it is a transfer of power from one branch of government to another—most notably from the legislative to the executive. The power of the executive branch is aggrandized by delegated power. The functionalists, at least Willis, understood this, By trying to fend off pesky “prisoners” and “busybodies,” the functionalists directed their attention as much to courts as to litigants seeking to challenge executive action in courts. The effect of their doing so was the preservation of administrative power.
As I’ve previously written, the upshot of this is that power can be wielded in either direction. Executive power in particular can be put towards social welfare ends. But power is inherently neutral, and is shaped by the person wielding it. Administrative power, just as much as it can be used for social welfare ends, can also be used to stymie social welfare goals. This much the administrative law functionalists teach us.
Double Aspect 