The UK Supreme Court’s decision today in R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51 contains a fascinating discussion of the principles relating to vires review of delegated legislation that infringes on fundamental rights. There is much that will be of interest to public lawyers around the Commonwealth. At issue was whether fees imposed in […] Read more

Deference doctrines have a tendency to wax and wane in their application. In Canada, exceptions to the general presumption of reasonableness review of administrative interpretations of law are stubbornly tenacious and, sometimes, reasonableness review is applied in such a non-deferential way as to invite accusations that the reviewing courts is engaged in “disguised correctness review”. […] Read more

Today, the British government published its European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, the legislation designed to give statutory effect to Brexit. There is much of interest in the Bill, which will be debated in the autumn. Clauses 1-6 form a swamp of definitions, rules and standards designed to avoid chaos by ensuring that EU law remains enforceable […] Read more

It is good to be back blogging, at least fleetingly, after a long absence. I hope to start posting more regularly over the next few weeks. Work on the next edition of Hogan and Morgan’s Administrative Law in Ireland continues apace. Irish readers and those from other jurisdictions might find something of interest in this […] Read more

Blogging is likely to be more than usually intermittent in the coming weeks and months. Most importantly, my wife and I are expecting our third child imminently. The new arrival will join a four-year-old and soon-to-be-three-year-old. Those of you who have survived having young children will understand that the next few months will be very […] Read more

My paper “The Signal and the Noise in Administrative Law” will appear later this year in a special Administrative Law issue of the University of New Brunswick Law Journal. I have made a few small modifications to the paper that I posted in November 2016. Thanks to the Law Society of Upper Canada and the […] Read more

I have posted an extended note on the UK Supreme Court’s decision in R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union on SSRN. My analytical framework is the one I developed in this post, which I wrote between the first-instance and Supreme Court decisions. I was initially quite positive about the Supreme […] Read more

One of the tasks that is occupying my time at present is the preparation of the next edition of Hogan and Morgan’s Administrative Law in Ireland. I contributed to the previous edition and will co-author the next. I drafted the passage below to try and provide a general explanation of why the Irish law on […] Read more

Professor Aditya Bamzai has a fascinating piece in the Yale Law Journal entitled “The Origins of Judicial Deference to Executive Interpretation“: Judicial deference to executive statutory interpretation—a doctrine now commonly associated with the Supreme Court’s decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council—is one of the central principles in modern American public law. Despite its […] Read more

Francophile readers might be interested in a post I contributed to the Blogdroiteuropéen on the law and politics of Article 50, concentrating on the difficulties of ensuring the status of EU nationals in the UK; the Irish question; and the difficulties of negotiating a UK-EU free trade agreement: Les deux prochaines années s’annoncent houleuses pour […] Read more