The Book · Chapter 17 of 28

Chapter 17Delegation, Discretion and Automated Administration

How can responsibility remain attributable when an institution delegates work across people, systems and providers, what evidence demonstrates meaningful human control in practice, and how should responsibility be allocated when that control fails?

Summary

An official can retain a statutory title while a system or supplier acquires practical control of the decision. This chapter examines that gap through the principle of No Authority Without Responsibility. It distinguishes six forms of computational assistance, develops effective delegation as an evidential inquiry, and asks whether interfaces, thresholds and institutional incentives preserve the discretion that governing law assigns. Comparative doctrine and competing scholarship support a function-based analysis without establishing a universal list of delegable powers. Responsibility is distributed across institutional and technical actors while remaining collectively complete. Two named failures sharpen the argument: Designed Administrative Abstention, which uses automation to avoid entrusted judgment, and the Institutional Moral Crumple Zone, which assigns blame without corresponding power. The chapter proposes observable conditions of meaningful human judgment and applies them to updates, enforcement and conditional agentic administration. Its standards require jurisdiction-specific reception and evidence of control in practice.

• effective delegation
• statutory discretion
• institutional responsibility
• meaningful judgment
• automation bias
• Designed Administrative Abstention
• Institutional Moral Crumple Zone
• agentic administration