What should an appellate court do in an appeal from an application of the proportionality test by a lower court? In his judgment for a unanimous UK Supreme Court in R (AR) v Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police [2018] UKSC 48, Lord Carnwath concluded that the appellate court need not conduct the proportionality analysis […] Read more

Following up on last week’s post on the public/private divide in Irish law and, indeed, last month’s post on the scope of judicial review in Canada, readers may be interested in  the most recent treatment by the Irish Supreme Court of the scope of judicial review, to be found in the fascinating case of O’Connell […] Read more

In Re X, 2017 CanLII 33034 (CA IRB), an important case I missed when it was decided last year, the Refugee Appeal Division of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board sat as a three-member panel with a view to setting out general rules as to how the RAD should deal with appeals from the (first-instance) Refugee […] Read more

I have been working on the “Scope of Judicial Review” chapter of Administrative Law in Ireland. There has been some controversy in recent times about the use of judicial review principles in a private law setting (see Varuhas and Lim & Chan). But in Ireland, as you will see from the extracts below, it is […] Read more

I spoke today at a conference on Parole: Law, Policy and Practice, organised by the Cambridge Centre for Criminal Justice, at which I commented on the recent decision of the Divisional Court in R (DSD and NBV) v  The Parole Board [2018] EWHC 694 (Admin). This was a judicial review of the Board’s decision to direct […] Read more

Last week’s output from the Supreme Court of Canada featured four administrative law cases: one about the analytical tools used by the Correctional Service of Canada for dealing with aboriginal offenders (Ewert v. Canada, 2018 SCC 30); one about the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal’s refusal to entertain discrimination claims brought by members of Indigenous communities  […] Read more

The UK Supreme Court will hear the Privacy International case in December 2018. I posted on the Court of Appeal decision here. One of the concerns the Court of Appeal had related to the extent to which sensitive material might leak into the public domain if the Investigatory Powers Tribunal is subject to judicial review.The […] Read more

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