Administrative Justice In Context

This book comprises a definitive collection of papers on administrative justice, written by a set of very distinguished contributors. It is divided into five parts, each of which contains articles on a particular aspect of administrative justice. The first part deals with the impact of 'contextual changes' on administrative justice and considers the implications of changes in governance and public administration, management and service delivery, information technology, audit and accounting, and human rights for administrative justice. The second part deals with conceptual issues and describes a number of competing approaches to the administrative justice. The third part deals with the application of administrative justice principles to private law disputes while the fourth part deals with the distinctive characteristics of administrative justice in three other jurisdictions. The final part deals with current developments in administrative justice and the book concludes with a discussion of legislative and policy developments in the UK. The general approach of the book is socio-legal and interdisciplinary. The chapters adopt a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including those derived from political science, public policy, social policy, accounting and information technology as well as from law. Although most of the contributors are academics, some are practitioners. For these reasons, the book should be of interest to lawyers, particularly those with interests in administrative law, and to social scientists, particularly those with interests in public administration, public policy and public management.

Unjust by Design describes a system in need of major restructuring. Written by a respected critic, it presents a modern theory of administrative justice fit for that purpose. It also provides detailed blueprints for the changes the author believes would be necessary if justice were to in fact assume its proper role in Canada’s administrative justice system.

"The core animating feature of administrative justice scholarship is the desire to understand how justice is achieved through the delivery of public services and the actions, inactions, and decision-making of administrative bodies. The study of administrative justice also encompasses the redress systems by which people can challenge administrative bodies to seek the correction of injustices. For a long time now, scholars have been interested in administrative justice, but without necessarily framing their work as such. Rather than existing under the rubric of administrative justice, much of the research undertaken has existed within sub-categories of disciplines, such as law, sociology, public policy, politics, and public administration. Consequently, although aspects of the topic have attracted rich contributions across such disciplines, administrative justice has rarely been studied or taught in a manner that integrates these areas of research more systematically. This Handbook signals a major change of approach. Drawing together a group of world-leading scholars of administrative justice from a range of disciplines, The Oxford Handbook of Administrative Justice shows how administrative justice is a vibrant, complex, and contested field that is best understood as an area of inquiry in its own right, rather than through traditional disciplinary silos"--

Exploring how justice is delivered at a time of rapid technological transformation, Justice in the Digital State exposes urgent issues surrounding the modernization of courts and tribunals whilst re-examining the effects on technology on established systems. Case studies investigate the rise of crowdfunded judicial reviews, the increasing use of data in justice system design, the digitalisation of tribunals, and the rise of ‘agile’ methodologies in building administrative justice systems. Joe Tomlinson’s cutting-edge research offers an authoritative and much-needed guide for navigating through the challenges of digital disruption. Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.

The UN’s capacity as an administrative decision-maker that affects the rights of individuals is a largely overlooked aspect of its role in international affairs. This book explores the potential for a model of administrative justice that might act as a benchmark to which global decision-makers could develop procedural standards. Applied to the UN’s internal justice, refugee status determination, NGO participation and the Security Council, the global administrative justice model is used to appraise the existing procedural protections within UN administrative decision-making.

The statutory duty of public service ombudsmen (PSO) is to investigate claims of injustice caused by maladministration in the provision of public services. This book examines the modern role of the ombudsman within the overall emerging system of administrative justice and makes recommendations as to how PSO should optimize their potential within the wider administrative justice context. Recent developments are discussed and long standing questions that have yet to be adequately resolved in the ombudsman community are re-evaluated given broader changes in the administrative justice sector. The work balances theory and empirical research conducted in a number of common law countries. Although there has been much debate within the ombudsman community in recent years aimed at developing and improving the practice of ombudsmanry, this work represents a significant advance on current academic understanding of the discipline.

‘In their beautifully written book, O’Brien and Doyle tell a story of small places – where human rights and administrative justice matter most. A human rights discourse is cleverly intertwined with the debates about the relationship between the citizen and the state and between citizens themselves. O’Brien and Doyle re-imagine administrative justice with the ombud institution at its core. This book is a must read for anyone interested in a democratic vision of human rights deeply embedded within the administrative justice system.’—Naomi Creutzfeldt, University of Westminster, UK 'Doyle and O'Brien's book makes an important and timely contribution to the growing literature on administrative justice, and breaks new ground in the way that it re-imagines the field. The book is engagingly written and makes a powerful case for reform, drawing on case studies and examples, and nicely combining theory and practice. The vision the authors provide of a more potent and coherent approach to administrative justice will be a key reference point for scholars, policymakers and practitioners working in this field for years to come.'—Dr Chris Gill, Lecturer in Public Law, University of Glasgow 'This immensely readable book ambitiously and successfully re-imagines adminstrative justice as an instrument of institutional reform, public trust, social rights and political friendship. It does so by expertly weaving together many disparate motifs and threads to produce an elegant tapestry illustrating a remaking of administrative justice as a set of principles with the ombud institution at its centre.’—Carolyn Hirst, Independent Researcher and Mediator, Hirstworks /divThis book reconnects everyday justice with social rights. It rediscovers human rights in the 'small places' of housing, education, health and social care, where administrative justice touches the citizen every day, and in doing so it re-imagines administrative justice and expands its democratic reach. The institutions of everyday justice – ombuds, tribunals and mediation – rarely herald their role in human rights frameworks, and never very loudly. For the most part, human rights and administrative justice are ships that pass in the night. Drawing on design theory, the book proposes to remedy this alienation by replacing current orthodoxies, not least that of 'user focus', with more promising design principles of community, network and openness. Thus re-imagined, the future of both administrative justice and social rights is demosprudential, firmly rooted in making response to citizen grievance more democratic and embedding legal change in the broader culture./div/div