From Antonin Scalia’s “Judicial Deference to Administrative Interpretations of Law“, easily the best ever introduction to an essay on administrative law: When I was invited to speak here at Duke Law School, I had originally intended to give a talk that refiected upon the relationship among the Bork confirmation hearings, the proposed federal salary increase, […] Read more

  In Youssef, an Egyptian national who has been present in Britain since 1994 challenged a decision taken in 2005 by the Foreign Secretary. In his capacity as a member of the U.N. Security Council’s Sanctions Committee, the Secretary had released a ‘hold’ on Mr. Youssef’s being placed on a sanctions list; the consequence of […] Read more

From the Privy Council comes an interesting review of the general principles governing retrospective legislation: Ferguson v. The Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago [2016] UKPC 2. The facts in the several cases under appeal arose out of the introduction of a ten-year statutory limitation period for criminal prosecutions in Trinidad and Tobago. At the […] Read more

The potential demise of so-called Auer or Seminole Rock deference has been discussed on the blog before (see here and here). The Supreme Court of the United States is now poised to consider interring the doctrine. However, in “The Unbearable Rightness of Auer“, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule encourage the Supreme Court to leave well […] Read more

The decision of the Court of Appeal in the high-profile case of R. (Miranda) v. Home Secretary, [2016] EWCA Civ. 6 was handed down last week. My interest in the case, which stems from the detention, questioning and search of David Miranda, was piqued by Laws L.J.’s discussion of the “prescribed by law” test at […] Read more

A trilogy of recent Canadian decisions raising standard of review issues have caught my eye. In each case, a standard of correctness is applied, but different reasons are given by each court. Indeed, it would be fair to say that each court follows a different analytical approach. Some more evidence, then, of confusion in this […] Read more

Yesterday, the Canadian government took the next step in its Senate reform process by appointing an advisory board, “an independent and non-partisan body whose mandate is to provide the Prime Minister with merit-based recommendations on Senate nominations”. I have blogged already about the new government’s use of mandate letters, issued to individual ministers, to impose […] Read more

The paper I prepared for the ‘Deference or Drift’ conference (that I was unfortunately unable to attend in person) focuses on several areas of administrative law doctrine in which Canadian courts have given the Crown special treatment that they do not give statutory decision-makers. Here is the first part… The Supreme Court of Canada has […] Read more

I have written before, somewhat sceptically, about the problem of ‘rebottling old wine’, updating the adjectival law of judicial review to take account of developments in the substantive law. Stratas J.A. had an interesting take on the question of the content of the record for judicial review in Bernard v. Canada (Revenue Agency), 2015 FCA […] Read more

A belated welcome to 2016. Normal post-holiday service should now resume. Some good news to begin the year. Administrative Law Matters won the 2015 Fodden Award for Best Canadian Law Blog. Here are the very kind and generous words of the judges: This was one of our toughest choices in years, thanks to the incredible […] Read more