Margaret Doyle & Nick O’Brien, Reimagining Administrative Justice, Tuesday March 16, 11.30 EST

The next speakers in this year’s Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium on “Front-Line Administration” are Margaret Doyle and Nick O’Brien. They will be having a dialogue about their recent book, Reimagining Administrative Justice: Human Rights in Small Spaces (Palgrave, 2019):

This 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.

I commented on their excellent book — a profound challenge to contemporary understandings of administrative justice, especially in administrative tribunals — here.

Register here for Tuesday’s event.

You can also register here for the remaining event in this year’s Colloquium.

This content has been updated on March 12, 2021 at 15:58.