Publication details
Instrumental Reason of Court Administration: Negative Dialectics and the Datafication of Judicial Governance
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | The concept of instrumental reason, i.e. the reduction of rationality to the calculation of means toward pregiven ends, and the corresponding eclipse of the capacity for substantive normative reflection, stands at the heart of the Frankfurt School's diagnosis of modernity. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer traced the pathological consequences of this reduction across science, culture, and politics. The administered society they described, governed by bureaucratic rationality and the culture industry alike, was one in which the formal structures of reason had become thoroughly detached from any emancipatory content. This paper argues that the datafication of judicial governance represents a paradigmatic instance of instrumental reason's colonisation of a domain of adjudication, whose legitimacy depends precisely on its resistance to purely calculative rationality. The paper attempts to reconstruct what Frankfurt Schoo, and Adorno's negative dialectics in particular, implies about the relationship between legal institutions and administrative rationality. It argues that for Adorno, law occupies a genuinely ambivalent position: it is simultaneously a vehicle of domination and a repository of normative promises that exceed and potentially contest their administrative reduction. Judicial independence, in this regard then, is not merely a constitutional technicality but a structural condition for preserving law's capacity to resist pure administrative instrumentalisation. Further the paper would like to examine how the datafication of courts operationalises instrumental reason within the judicial institution itself. When judicial quality is rendered as a reversal rate, when judicial independence is measured through clearance ratios, and when budget allocation is determined by throughput metrics, the substantive normative dimensions of adjudication, such as the quality of legal reasoning, the protection of minority rights, or the development of legal doctrine, are systematically marginalised by criteria of quantitative efficiency. This is not merely a governance failure; it is, in Frankfurt School terms, a manifestation of the administered society penetrating the last institutional domain that claimed immunity from it. Lastly, the paper should turn to Habermas's reconstruction of Frankfurt School critical theory through the theory of communicative action, asking whether his distinction between system and lifeworld, and his account of the juridification of communicative relations, offers theoretical resources for normatively reconstructing judicial governance in ways that resist pure administrative colonisation through its datafication. The paper concludes by suggesting that Habermasian discourse theory, despite its well-documented limitations, may offer more traction than Adornian negative dialectics for the constructive theoretical task that the datafication of courts demands. |
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