Aditya Mishra has posted From Defect to Illegality: Modes of Contamination in Judicial Review on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Judicial review is commonly framed in terms of identifying defects in public decision-making, whether by way of error of law, procedural impropriety, or failure to comply with statutory requirements. Yet the presence of a defect does not, of itself, render a decision unlawful. Illegality in judicial review is concerned with authority: a decision is unlawful only where a defect bears a legally relevant connection to the exercise of the decision-maker’s power or duty.
This article examines how that connection is established. It argues that a range of doctrines often treated as discrete-materiality, jurisdictional pre-conditions, and second-actor reasoning-are better understood as addressing different modes of contamination: the mechanisms by which a defect may (or may not) transmit illegality to a reviewable decision or act. The article develops a four-fold taxonomy of such modes, distinguishing between causal materiality, jurisdictional nexus, derivative authority, and derivative consequences.
By analysing these modes in turn, the article clarifies how unlawfulness is transmitted, why some defects do not invalidate later decisions, and why doctrinal confusion arises when causal, jurisdictional, and remedial reasoning are elided. More broadly, the taxonomy illuminates the nature of illegality in administrative law as a relational concept grounded in authority rather than outcome.