Commentary on developments in administrative law, particularly judicial review of administrative action by common law courts.
I have posted “The Vavilov Framework and the Future of Canadian Administrative Law” to SSRN: This paper is the first comprehensive analysis of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Vavilov v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2019 SCC 65. Here, the Supreme Court rewrote its administrative law jurisprudence, aiming to bring clarity and coherence to […] Read more
Every year from 2020 I will be organizing an Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium (funded by the University Research Chair in Administrative Law & Governance) at the University of Ottawa. Students can take the Colloquium for credit (more details below). Here is the schedule for 2020: Professor Gillian Metzger, Stanley H. Fuld Professor of Law, […] Read more
A new edited collection from the University of Toronto Press Read more
This is the fourth and final post in a series: see the previous posts here, here and here. Having explained in the previous section how front-line administrative officials should not exercise the discretion and judgement they inevitably exercise, I turn in this section to how they should do so. My answer has two prongs. First, […] Read more
Readers who enjoyed my posts on the framework for judicial review of administrative action set out by the Supreme Court of Canada in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65 will also enjoy Justice David Stratas’s updated paper, “The Canadian Law of Judicial Review: Some Doctrine and Cases“, which now takes […] Read more
The fifth edition of Administrative Law in Ireland (Round Hall, Dublin, 2019) rolled off the printing presses and into mailbags just before the holidays. Here is the publisher’s blurb: For over 30 years, Hogan and Morgan has been the leading work on administrative law and judicial review in Ireland.This new edition of Administrative Law in […] Read more
This is the third post in a series. The first two can be found here and here. Given the inevitability of administrative discretion and judgement, how ought it be exercised? I argue in this section that it would be unrealistic and inappropriate for front-line officials to be expected to reason as lawyers would. It would […] Read more
In my first post on the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Vavilov I described it as a commendable effort to comprehensively address two issues, namely the selection of the standard of review and the application of the reasonableness standard, which have plagued Canadian administrative law for decades. Significantly, judges with divergent views on the […] Read more
Despite occasional suggestions to the contrary, remedial discretion is a key feature of contemporary administrative law. In Vavilov, the majority discussed the issue at surprising length — surprising because although remedial discretion is by now a well-developed phenomenon, it is rarely the subject of detailed discussion. The majority set out a variety of factors which […] Read more
The Vavilov framework is intended to be a clear break with the past: “A court seeking to determine what standard is appropriate in a case before it should look to these reasons first in order to determine how this general framework applies to that case” (at para. 143). Given the reformulations effected in Vavilov, some […] Read more
In early 2015 I was scheduled to present a paper called “2020 Vision: Dunsmuir 2.0” to a judicial training seminar. I never made it to the seminar and the paper was never published: I submitted it to a leading Canadian journal but when it came back with a “revise and resubmit” I ultimately dropped it […] Read more