Sometimes courts reach the right results for the wrong reasons. The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Highwood Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Judicial Committee) v. Wall, 2018 SCC 26, an important case about the scope of judicial review of administrative action, is a good example. The outcome is surely the right one, but the way […] Read more

There is a very useful discussion of the relationship between the “language” of administrative law and the grounds of review of judicial review of administrative action in the recent decision of the UK Supreme Court in R (Gallaher Group Ltd) v Competition and Markets Authority [2018] UKSC 25. At issue here was differential treatment of […] Read more

David Mullan was (unsurprisingly) quite right: the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in West Fraser Mills Ltd. v. British Columbia (Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal), 2018 SCC 22 seems to shed some light on how the Court is likely to approach the trilogy of cases in which it will revisit the standard of review analysis. There […] Read more

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Canada did something very unusual, granting leave to appeal in three judicial review cases and explaining: The Court is of the view that these appeals provide an opportunity to consider the nature and scope of judicial review of administrative action, as addressed in Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, [2008] 1 S.C.R. […] Read more

Laden down with red wine and chocolate, the fruits of a Friday-afternoon trip to the shops on rue Daguerre, I struggled to hoist my luggage onto the Eurostar, at the end of a recent visit to Paris. Such are the delights of life in the European Single Market. Better to stock up now, I reflected, […] Read more

R (Bancoult) v Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary (No 3) [2018] UKSC 3 is the latest episode in a saga — tragedy, really — involving the Chagossians, an island-dwelling group of people forcibly removed in the 1970s by the British government from the Chagos Islands, a British territory in the Indian Ocean, evidently to serve Britain’s […] Read more

I have recently made two forthcoming papers available on SSRN. Both are in French*. Both originated as talks given at the Université de Montréal, one in 2016 and the other more recently. The English abstracts are below. First, Reprendre le contrôle : ennuis et ironies (the Ironies of ‘Taking Back Control’): This text is based on […] Read more

This is the third post on Irish administrative law arising from my draft paper for the Oxford Handbook of Irish Politics. Comments welcome! Alternative Dispute Resolution Great attention has been paid in recent years in the common-law world to alternative dispute resolution, which we can for present purposes define quite simply as means of resolving […] Read more

This is the second post on Irish administrative law arising from my draft paper for the Oxford Handbook of Irish Politics. Comments welcome! Institutional Pluralism Counterbalancing the centripetal qualities of Article 34.3.1 and Article 34.3.2, are the centrifugal tendencies of provisions elsewhere in the 1937 Constitution. Article 34.3.4 envisages “Courts of local and limited jurisdiction […] Read more

One of the most striking things for me about returning to Britain in 2016 after six years in Canada was how I needed to produce a passport to do just about anything, from opening a bank account to examining a PhD student. These are not the identity checks familiar to people the world over, for […] Read more