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

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Canada did something very unusual, granting leave to appeal in three judicial review cases and explaining: The Court is of the view that these appeals provide an opportunity to consider the nature and scope of judicial review of administrative action, as addressed in Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, [2008] 1 S.C.R. […] Read more

Laden down with red wine and chocolate, the fruits of a Friday-afternoon trip to the shops on rue Daguerre, I struggled to hoist my luggage onto the Eurostar, at the end of a recent visit to Paris. Such are the delights of life in the European Single Market. Better to stock up now, I reflected, […] Read more

R (Bancoult) v Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary (No 3) [2018] UKSC 3 is the latest episode in a saga — tragedy, really — involving the Chagossians, an island-dwelling group of people forcibly removed in the 1970s by the British government from the Chagos Islands, a British territory in the Indian Ocean, evidently to serve Britain’s […] Read more

I have recently made two forthcoming papers available on SSRN. Both are in French*. Both originated as talks given at the Université de Montréal, one in 2016 and the other more recently. The English abstracts are below. First, Reprendre le contrôle : ennuis et ironies (the Ironies of ‘Taking Back Control’): This text is based on […] Read more

This is the third post on Irish administrative law arising from my draft paper for the Oxford Handbook of Irish Politics. Comments welcome! Alternative Dispute Resolution Great attention has been paid in recent years in the common-law world to alternative dispute resolution, which we can for present purposes define quite simply as means of resolving […] Read more