Interpreting Legislation Inside Digital Bureaucracies: The Possibilities of New Norms from New Practices

Bureaucracies, not courts, are the primary interpreters of legislation in contemporary administrative law, yet this remains one of the field's most neglected realities. This chapter seeks to advance understanding of contemporary administrative statutory interpretation by examining how the progressive digitalisation of public administrative infrastructure holds the potential to change interpretive practice and argumentation. Drawing on the workings of the Department for Work and Pensions — the UK's principal welfare agency — the chapter observes three recent and largely unanalysed examples: the emergence of a pilot programme to translate benefits law into code; the growing role of user design officials as a distinctive interpretive community; and the increasing deployment of arguments that legislation should be construed in light of the operational capacities of digital systems built to implement it. Together, these developments defy straightforward characterisation, but they demonstrate that the digitalisation of administration has the potential to be not merely an operational phenomenon but also a jurisprudential one, in the sense that it can reshape the conditions under which interpretation is conducted within large-scale public bureaucracies.