Delegated Discretion: When Authority Lacks Evaluative Control in Fiduciary and Administrative Law

This article theorises a structural condition in contemporary governance: delegated discretion, defined as the persistence of decision-making authority in the absence of evaluative control. It arises where authority is formally distributed across an institutional chain while the evaluative framework governing decisions is not operable by any actor within that chain. Existing literatures in fiduciary law, administrative law, and principal–agent theory presuppose that such control is located somewhere within the authority structure. The administrative-law tradition on discretion makes the same presupposition: the programme of confining, structuring and checking discretion, in place of its elimination, assumes throughout an identifiable actor who holds the discretion and can be made answerable for the standards it applies. The article shows that this presupposition can fail without doctrinal recognition, such that governance arrangements may satisfy formal oversight requirements while lacking any actor capable of assessing the standards they apply. Three consequences follow. First, responsibility misalignment: fiduciary doctrine attributes responsibility on the assumption that authority entails evaluative control. Second, recognition indeterminacy: actors cannot determine whether such control exists within the chain. Third, doctrinal distortion: oversight and non-abdication operate on assumptions that are not satisfied under this condition. These claims are developed through fiduciary doctrine in Delaware and England, supported by a case study in AI-mediated corporate governance and illustrations from algorithmic administration and central banking. The article concludes that governance is mis-specified as a problem of discretion rather than evaluative control: even the discretion tradition's most developed response presupposes the very locus whose absence defines the condition.