The Social Side of Fair Process

Abstract

This article argues that fair administrative process—a central idea of contemporary administrative law—has an under-theorized social side. This is the idea that the public’s perceived (un)fair experiences of administrative processes, particularly in everyday encounters with government, affect their attitudes and behaviours over time. In the aggregate, this effect can potentially shape the capacity of the state to implement policy, the overall outcomes of public action, and, in turn, society. The article will show how existing empirical evidence suggests advancing understanding of this social side of fair administrative process could present a viable pathway to improving the efficacy of public action and what the state might be capable of achieving more broadly. However, it also suggests that maximizing the possibilities here requires administrative lawyers to expand how they conceive of and study procedural fairness in the context of modern government.