Introduction

Public administrative law governs how public authorities make decisions that affect citizens - from social benefits and tax assessments to building permits and expropriations. AI is rapidly moving into this terrain, both as decision-support for caseworkers and as fully automated decision-making, and that raises fundamental questions about the legal safeguards meant to protect citizens.

This pillar explores the meeting point between administrative law and AI: How is the duty to give reasons preserved when decisions are produced by models we cannot fully explain? What happens to the caseworker's legal discretion when an algorithm narrows the choices? How do core principles such as legality, proportionality, equality, and the right to be heard translate into a digital administration? And how do the AI Act, GDPR, and Danish administrative law interact in practice?

What makes the field genuinely interesting is that AI does not only challenge administrative law - it also forces us to articulate, with new precision, what the rule of law actually requires of a modern public administration.