Courts around Canada are beginning to apply the Vavilov framework. It is still (just about) too early to draw any firm conclusions. Nonetheless, even at this early stage in the life of Vavilovian judicial review there have been some interesting decisions. I have been coming back to this post periodically to update it with significant […] Read more

Last week’s Supreme Court of Canada decision in British Columbia (Attorney General) v. Provincial Court Judges’ Association of British Columbia, 2020 SCC 20 is most important for what it says about some relatively niche issues of Canadian public law but it also touches on broader matters, such as the relationship between procedure and substance in […] Read more

The British government has published the terms of an Independent Review of Administrative Law, to be conducted by a panel of illustrious legal experts, including academics Carol Harlow, Alan Page and Nick McBride: 1. Whether the amenability of public law decisions to judicial review by the courts and the grounds of public law illegality should […] Read more

The Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium is a series of seminars with world-leading experts on public law, who will discuss their scholarship in depth in sessions chaired by Professor Paul Daly, the University Research Chair in Administrative Law & Governance. Attendance is open to all. The Colloquium’s Directed Research Project can be taken for 3 […] Read more

Vulnerable: The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19, edited by Colleen M. Flood, Vanessa MacDonnell, Jane Philpott, Sophie Thériault and Sridhar Venkatapuram has just been published by the University of Ottawa Press. Download the whole book for free here. It is remarkable to see this peer-reviewed collection in print less than three months after contributors […] Read more

Since the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Vavilov, I have given a number of presentations to administrative tribunal members on the implications of the revised understanding of reasonableness review. Here is the heart of the presentation, focusing on four key post-Vavilov issues In Vavilov, the majority identifies “two types of fundamental flaws…that may show […] Read more

I am very happy to say that my project on machine learning in public administration is going to be funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The most recent list of Insight grant awards is here. Regular readers will have seen some of this material before but I thought it would be worth […] Read more

Over at the United Kingdom Constitutional Law Association blog, I have written a post about my forthcoming article on the “Culture of Justification” in administrative law, penned in response to a recent post by Professor Jason Varuhas. As he observes, the procedural and substantive law of judicial review has changed greatly in recent decades, a […] Read more

Predicting the long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has become a cottage industry. It is also something of a fool’s errand as the medium- to long-term outcomes depend in large part on how many waves of COVID-19 sweep over us and how bad the effects are. Nonetheless, for what little they are worth, let me […] Read more

With the support of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society I will be moderating a discussion of the recent Federal Court of Appeal decision in Entertainment Software Assoc. v. Society Composers, 2020 FCA 100, a case at the intersection of copyright law and administrative law. I will be joined by Carys J. Craig (Osgoode […] Read more

I am currently working on a chapter for “Leading Works in Public Law”, a collection edited by Ben Yong and Patrick O’Brien. My chapter is on SA de Smith’s Judicial Review of Administrative Action. Here is a draft of the third section, on “The Significance” The Significance Judicial Review of Administrative Action was “the first […] Read more