Administrative Justice in the Modern Mixed Administrative State: Moving Beyond Taxonomies

The challenges that government outsourcing presents for administrative law were the topic of considerable scholarly discussion in the 1990s and early 2000s, with broad agreement amongst public lawyers that outsourcing should not result in a loss of the particular kind of accountability with which administrative justice is concerned. Yet, over the past two decades, while government outsourcing has continued and evolved, very little has been done to address these challenges. This article explores the question of when non-court-based administrative justice accountability mechanisms ought to extend to outsourced government functions. I argue that much of the focus of administrative lawyers to date has been on the approaches that courts should take, which has led governments and legislatures to adopt tests and taxonomies largely developed in or for the courts, which distinguish between ‘public’ and ‘private’ functions. I show that these taxonomies are not well adapted to administrative justice mechanisms outside of the courts, are not fit for purpose in many modern government outsourcing arrangements and have resulted in significant accountability gaps. I propose a different starting point for thinking about administrative justice in the modern mixed administrative state, based on normative principles as opposed to categories.