For the second time in six months, the Supreme Court of Canada has released a decision in a judicial review case brought by an applicant seeking a procedural solution to a substantive problem. In Canada (Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness) v. Chhina, 2019 SCC 29, as in R. v. Bird, 2019 SCC 7 (noted here), […] Read more

The United Kingdom Supreme Court handed down its decision in R (Privacy International) v Investigatory Powers Tribunal [2019] UKSC 22 this morning. There are four judgments: a plurality judgment by Lord Carnwath (with whom Lady Hale and Lord Kerr concur) and dissenting judgments by Lord Sumption (with whom Lord Reed concurs) and Lord Wilson. There is […] Read more

After three extraordinarily happy years in Cambridge, I am moving back to Canada, where I will seek to repay the University of Ottawa’s faith in me as a legal scholar, as the University Research Chair in Administrative Law & Governance. The University’s announcement can be found here, with more details on the website of the […] Read more

The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement was concluded in 2006, settling class actions brought against the Government of Canada and religious organizations by those who suffered abuse in residential schools. Over a period of almost 150 years, around 150,000 young First Nations, Inuit and Métis children attended Indian Residential Schools run by religious orders and […] Read more

As all but the newest readers of this blog are aware, the Supreme Court of Canada should, sometime this year, release a trilogy of decisions intended to clarify the Canadian law of standard of review. It is by now very clear that the stakes are quite high. A tour of recent appellate and first-instance decisions […] Read more

This is the third post in a series. The first two can be accessed here and here. Sentencing of criminal defendants requires an individualised analysis of the offender, the offence and the public interest, with a view to fixing an appropriate punishment.[1] It is for a judge to fix the sentence, but she must do […] Read more

This is the second post in a series. The introductory post is here. In Bureaucratic Justice: Managing Social Security Disability Claims,[1] Professor Jerry Mashaw set out three influential “models” of administrative justice. Further iterations have been suggested by Michael Adler[3] and Robert Kagan,[4] but for present purposes Mashaw’s models are sufficient. A bureaucratic rationality model […] Read more

I was at the Socio-Legal Studies Association Conference today at the University of Leeds, presenting a work in progress, “Artificial Administration: Administrative Justice in the Age of Machines”. In this post, I explain my interest in this important issue We live in the era of Big Data, a term that “triggers both utopian and dystopian […] Read more

Today was supposed to be Brexit Day, the day Britain would leave the European Union, two years after triggering the departure process under Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union. Ironically enough, the United Kingdom would have left not when the clock strikes midnight in London, but at 11pm GMT, midnight in Brussels, a […] Read more