A pragmatist approach to the administrative state: A new interpretation of John Willis’s ‘three approaches to administrative law’

In this article, I offer an alternative interpretation of John Willis’s article ‘Three Approaches to Administrative Law: The Judicial, the Conceptual, and the Functional,’ published in the University of Toronto Law Journal in 1935. While celebrated as one of the founding fathers of Canadian administrative law, Willis has also been heavily criticized for his strong opposition to judicial review of administrative action. These criticisms, however, seem less pressing if his proposal for a functionalist approach to administrative law can be reinterpreted as being aligned with the American pragmatist tradition. According to this reinterpretation, I look back to argue that the philosophical assumptions of this school of thought can shed new light on Willis’s resistance to judicial review at the time of his writing. Then I look forward to claim that, if we reinterpret Willis’s proposal according to philosophical pragmatism’s assumptions, a functionalist approach to administrative law seems very much in line with Canadian administrative law today.