Abstract Decisions of public administrations are often disputed in courts. Courts usually have much less expertise in the field of the decision than the administrative body whose original decision is challenged. Therefore the question arises whether administrative decisions which are handed down by experts in their field should actually be subject to court control. In this paper, I first show that control by experts may be better than no control at all, if review is triggered by an appeals process or if review increases administrators' incentives to hand down correct decisions. The simple model also shows that without the incentive effect, the error probability of reviewing courts should be lower than the administration's error probability. In an extension of the model, I discuss the reasons and effect of discretionary ranges for administrative decisions
