Year in Review

My blogging year has been dominated — almost bookended, even — by two symposiums, one (held jointly with Double Aspect) to mark the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Dunsmuir v New Brunswick (see here), and another on a United Kingdom Supreme Court appeal concerning ouster or privative clauses, published on Administrative Law in the Common Law World.

Canadian and UK material dominated the blog this year as usual, with the UK pensions dispute and immigration regime personal favourites, but there were happy forays into New Zealand (here and here) and Australia. Some teaching in France also provided some food for thought (and, of course, food for my pantry). Regular readers will have noticed a good deal of Irish material, a direct result of my co-authorship of the fifth edition of Hogan and Morgan’s Administrative Law in Ireland, due to be sent to the printers on April 1 (no, really).

Readers have been logging on from around the world throughout the year, judges included. The very first blog post cited by the Supreme Court of Canada (here, at para. 35) was one of mine and I was delighted to see that one of my blogs on internal administrative appeals recently garnered a mention from the Federal Court of Canada. I suspect this is a harbinger of things to come. Although law blogs might be on the slide in the United States (RIP Concurring Opinions), they are on the rise elsewhere in the common law world — certainly in Canada mine and others are regularly cited by counsel in written submissions — and I expect this trend to strengthen in the years ahead.

What to expect in 2018? Two edited collections published by the University of Toronto Press will certainly hit the shops this year, Apex Courts and the Common Law and (with Richard Albert and Vanessa MacDonnell), The Canadian Constitution in Transition. Some of the draft papers I mentioned here might appear in 2019 but are more likely to take material form in 2020.

As well as Hogan and Morgan, I am working on several long-term projects: monographs on administrative law and legislation (though I’ve not spent as much time on these as I would have liked, and they haven’t particularly lent themselves to blogging in any case); an edited collection on public law methodology (with Joe Tomlinson); and the rise of artificial administration. As far as articles and shorter comments are concerned, I’ve already promised a blog post about the future of Chevron deference in the United States and, if time allows, I will post on appellate review (building on posts here and here), methodology in public law, judicial review of economic regulation and the role of information technology in administrative law and administrative justice. And, of course, there are some Supreme Court decisions to look forward to…

Thanks for reading in 2018 and best wishes to you all for 2019!

This content has been updated on December 30, 2018 at 17:27.