Public administrations are increasingly deploying algorithmic systems to facilitate the application, execution, and enforcement of regulation, a practice that can be denoted as algorithmic regulation. While their reliance on digital technology is not new, both the scale at which they automate administrative acts and the importance of the decisions they delegate to algorithmic tools is on the rise. In this chapter, I contextualize this phenomenon and discuss the implementation of algorithmic regulation across several public sector domains. I then assess some of the ethical and legal conundrums that public administrations face when outsourcing their tasks to such systems and provide an overview of the legal framework that governs this practice, with a particular focus on the European Union. This framework encompasses not only constitutional and administrative law but also data protection law and AI-specific law. Finally, I offer some take-aways for public administrations to consider when seeking to deploy algorithmic regulation.

What are the weaknesses of the current tax compliance rules, and how can these rules more effectively address the challenge of high-end tax noncompliance? This chapter first describes the limitations of the traditional responses to tax noncompliance in the law and in prominent reform proposals. It then introduces a new approach: a system of means-adjusted tax compliance rules. As we argue, this approach can both complement the traditional responses to noncompliance and counter their limitations to build a more robust and effective tax compliance system. The final section of this chapter describes how introducing means adjustments to the tax compliance rules would not be a radically new direction for tax reform, but rather an extension and rationalization of principles that are already embedded in the current tax law.

This chapter addresses symmetry’s implications for separation of powers and federalism. It suggests that some major structural questions, such as the long-running debate over the president’s authority to fire or “remove” executive officers, hold an intensity out of step with their current political stakes. By contrast, other recent decisions, particularly those limiting agency authority over “major” policy questions and intensively reviewing the reasoned justification for certain policies, threaten to enable selective judicial disapproval of policies favored by progressives rather than conservatives. A preference for symmetry should support limiting or reconsidering these decisions. With respect to federalism, symmetry should likewise encourage the development of doctrines that grant parallel opportunities and protections to rival “red” and “blue” states dominated by either the Democratic or Republican Party.

This chapter looks at the ways in which the police is defined and confined by internal standards of constitutional acceptability. Before we get to the matter of individual rights, we must ask the question of whether and to what extent the police power is being used in ways that are reasonable, not arbitrary, and not the product of animus or unacceptable influence. These internal structural considerations have been used to limit the scope of the power and, more to the point of this chapter, they have the potential of being used in a way that reconciles broad governmental power with the protection of citizen interests and liberty.

This chapter begins a new part, this focusing on structural considerations in the scope and exercise of the police power. Some of the critical issues involving the power involve who gets to exercise it, and upon what conditions. The separation of powers among departments of government is relevant here, and there have been concerns in courts when the state legislatures delegate the exercise of this power to governors and administrators. We discuss some of these controversies in this chapter. Moreover, we discuss the ways in which the police power has long been used by local governments to implement health, safety, and welfare objectives in their community. The relationship between state and local governments, often labelled “localism,” in order to capture the constitutional dimensions of this dynamic relationship, is a focal point of this chapter.

This chapter addresses the widespread perception that rural politics are characterized by irrational antigovernment sentiment, right-wing conspiracy theories, and other ideological drivers. This perception includes the stereotype that rural residents are generally conservatives who “vote against their interests” when liberal policies might appear to help their communities more. The chapter argues that rural views on government are just as often rational reactions to the unique impacts of law, regulation, and government in rural communities. Drawing on legitimacy theory, the chapter argues that rural grievances toward the federal regulatory state specifically reflect predictable concerns relating to procedural justice, substantive outcomes, and a sense that agencies prioritize concerns other than rural residents’ concerns. Although rural views vary, and intersect with other identities such as race, diverse rural populations exhibit common concerns about agencies posing threats to livelihoods and failing to offer protection from environmental threats. The chapter argues that overlap between subjective rural sentiments and objective structural features of the regulatory state lend credence to rural views as not irrational. Barriers to public participation in agency rulemaking, regulatory cost–benefit analysis, and implementation of the Endangered Species Act all illustrate instances of the regulatory state often failing to take meaningful rural concerns seriously.

This chapter addresses the history of the refugee oral hearing in Australia and Canada. It explains how and why the oral hearing became a central event within RSD processes in each jurisdiction and traces the role of refugee testimony up until the introduction of a quasi-independent administrative process for RSD and into the present day. In both countries, the introduction of statutory RSD procedures and an oral hearing represented a shift toward enhanced administrative rights and justice for onshore refugee arrivals. However, it also occurred in the context of an increasing state focus on the ‘genuineness’ of refugees and major reforms that sought to limit and control onshore refugee arrivals in both jurisdictions. The chapter then traces more recent reforms to RSD processes in Australia and Canada. This later history reveals that the ‘right’ to fair and independent decision-making processes has become increasingly constrained in both jurisdictions, and that limiting access to RSD has become a key means by which states enact policies of refugee deterrence and exclusion.

This chapter marks the book’s shift from examining the demand for a particular refugee story during the oral hearing, to considering how decision-makers used narratives to test and contest refugee applicants’ testimony. It presents a key finding from the hearings: that decision-makers often engaged in ‘narrative contests’ with the applicant, presenting their own counter-narratives of how events should have taken place if the story presented were to meet the credibility standard of plausibility. The chapter details how the criterion of ‘plausibility’ forges a direct link between credibility assessment and the narrative form, and also sets out the minimal law or policy that governs the testing of oral evidence during the hearing in Australia and Canada. As a result, decision-makers were relatively free to engage in a form of questioning that went beyond asking refugee applicants for information or explanation. Instead, they presented alternative, hypothetical accounts of how events would have taken place if the story (and by implication, the applicant) were credible. When engaging in these narrative contests, decision-makers’ narrative expectations were often deeply subjective, idiosyncratic and unpredictable. The chapter also reveals that in navigating these exchanges, certain applicants displayed high levels of agency and resistance vis-à-vis decision-makers’ own narrative assumptions and their vast power to direct evidence.

A core impediment to refugee applicants providing a credible narrative account of their claims to protection is the profound fragmentation and unpredictability of the structure, content and conduct of the oral hearing. This chapter argues that the conduct of the oral hearing severely fragmented applicants’ testimony in three key ways: reverse-order questioning; decision-makers’ abrupt subject switching during the hearing; and questions pertaining to time, sequencing and precise dates of events. This leads to the conclusion that applicants were both expected to present their oral evidence in a form that fulfilled the credibility criteria and the demand for narrative, and actively impeded in their efforts to do so. Further, where applicants displayed an ability to present evidence in a narrative form, in all but a minority of hearings this was done despite, rather than because of, the structure and setting of the hearing.

Social workers make decisions every day involving the protection of children and/or adults who are at risk of, or are experiencing, abuse and neglect, exercising power and authority derived from law. Social workers must act within the law: “doing things right.” Accountable, legally literate practice additionally includes standards from administrative law when statutory duties are used. However, decision-making frequently also raises ethical dilemmas, including whether, when, and how to intervene in people’s lives. Practice must, therefore, be ethically literate: “doing right things.” Human rights, equality, and social justice issues will also feature in social work decision-making: “right thinking.” This chapter presents a framework for social worker decision-making that is legally and ethically, but also emotionally, relationally, organizationally and knowledge, literate. It proposes that this framework is transferable across the different jurisdictions within which social workers practice, and that it helps social workers to make good as well as lawful decisions.