Varieties of Administrative Abuse

If we are to succeed in crafting appropriate solutions to prevent abuses of administrative discretion, we must pay serious attention to three major perspectives that shape the exercise of administrative authority: the perspective of lawmakers, who create at least four different kinds of discretion; the perspective of clients, who may suffer from one or more of five major forms of administrative abuse; and the perspective of practitioners, who are influenced in varying ways by the moral propensities of the work setting. The article concludes with a brief discussion and illustration of how these multiple perspectives need to be taken into account when devising solutions to prevent various abuses of administrative discretion.