Data Sheet 1_The contractual vacuum: AI procurement and the erosion of good administration.pdf

When public bodies deploy these third-party systems, they introduce an acute systemic risk: a structural “contractual vacuum” emerges wherein public authorities lack the practical data telemetry required to reconstruct, explain, or correct algorithmic administrative actions.

This article evaluates the doctrinal limitations of contemporary European and common law public procurement frameworks, demonstrating that conventional commercial procurement defaults inherently thin down the non-delegable duty of good administration. To bridge the structural divide between administrative law and systems engineering, this study introduces the methodology of computational legal design through a nested Three-Layer Accountability Framework.