I have been busily marking exam scripts for the last couple of weeks, which in part explains the recent slowdown in blogging activity. I thought it would be fun to post my administrative law exam. It’s in French, followed — just for fun — by a Google Translate version: Lors du printemps 2015, les activités […] Read more

I am happy to be able to post a link to an almost-final version of my chapter for Mark Elliott and Hanna Wilberg’s forthcoming collection, The Scope and Intensity of Substantive Review: Traversing Taggart’s Rainbow, to be published next month by Hart Publishing. Here is the abstract: In the common law tradition, courts are at […] Read more

This year’s common law conference at the University of Montreal is on the law of charitable trusts. As usual, there is a wide range of guests from all over the common law world on topics of interest to public and private lawyers. Register here. Here is the programme: 8.30 – 9.00 Keynote Address Judge Alison […] Read more

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law” (“The Path of the Law” (1897), 10 Harvard Law Review 457, at p. 461). He adopted the perspective of the “bad man”, someone “who cares only for the material […] Read more

Modern examples of successful exclusion of the rules of procedural fairness are relatively rare. An interesting recent example is  CPCF v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, [2015] HCA 1, a typically lengthy and thorough decision of the High Court of Australia. There are very useful summaries available on the University of Melbourne’s Opinions on […] Read more

Mark Elliott has a typically excellent post on the UK Supreme Court’s decision in the Pham case (my post). Proportionality now seems destined to emerge as a common-law ground of review in the UK, in at least some circumstances, a development partly justified on the family resemblance between reasonableness and proportionality. Mark writes: Pham is […] Read more

David Mullan’s comment on yesterday’s post prompts me to give (virtual) voice to a thought about the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay (City), 2015 SCC 16. Gascon J. reviewed the question of the scope of the state’s duty of religious neutrality on a standard of correctness — allowing him […] Read more

My administrative law students will sit their final exam on Friday. So some of them having been coming to see me with questions about the finer points of Canadian administrative law doctrine. Often, my answer is: “Je ne sais pas”. And, unfortunately, the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay (City), […] Read more

The decision of the Federal Court of Appeal in Paradis Honey Ltd. v. Canada, 2015 FCA 89 is quite remarkable. A majority of the Court developed a new test for public authority liability in tort, casting off the previous unwieldy private-law framework in favour of an approach that relies exclusively on public law concepts. The […] Read more

Shortly after a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada wrote that when fundamental rights are engaged by an administrative decision, “reasonableness requires proportionality” (here, at para. 38), the members of the UK Supreme Court said something very similar in Pham v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, [2015] UKSC 19. The case was […] Read more