What makes an administrative decision unreasonable?

Journal article

Abstract:: The nature of reasonableness review in administrative law has long been obscured behind vivid but uninformative descriptions. In recent years, courts and commentators have recognised that reasonableness review involves assessment of the weight and balance of reasons bearing on a decision. Yet by itself this idea is substantially incomplete, for there are many ways in which issues of weight might be relevant. Drawing on the theory of practical reason, this article offers a new account of the reasonableness standard that explains precisely how the weight of reasons matters. It shows, negatively, that several existing accounts are mistaken. Positively, it proposes that reasonableness be understood as a requirement of ‘relativised justification’: a decision must be justified relative to some eligible understanding of the balance of reasons. This account explains the standard's central features and yields a coherent, workable test for courts to apply.

Files:: Dindjer_2021_What_makes_an.pdf

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Copyright holder:: Dindjer, H.
Rights statement:: © 2020 The Author. The Modern Law Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Modern Law Review Limited. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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