What should an appellate court do in an appeal from an application of the proportionality test by a lower court? In his judgment for a unanimous UK Supreme Court in R (AR) v Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police [2018] UKSC 48, Lord Carnwath concluded that the appellate court need not conduct the proportionality analysis […] Read more

Nicolas Lambert, Faculté de droit, Université de Moncton If two administrative lawyers met in a bar, chances are they would succeed in having a conversation in which no one but them would understand what is being discussed. Another likely possibility is that even if they agreed with each other politically and morally, their ways of […] Read more

What follows is a longer version of a short note written for Per Incuriam, the termly publication of the Cambridge University Law Society. As is well known, perhaps even notorious, there is no general common law duty to give reasons for administrative decisions. Even those judges who seem in favour of recognising a general duty […] Read more

An interesting aspect of the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in Canada (Attorney General) v. Igloo Vikski Inc., 2016 SCC 38 is the application of reasonableness review. The question was whether certain items of hockey equipment used by goalkeepers are a “glove, mitten or mitt” or an “article of plastics”, an important question because different tariffs […] Read more

Regular readers will know that I have been following very closely the Canadian case law on internal administrative appeals. Three recent decisions, two from the Federal Court of Appeal on the Refugee Appeal Decision (the body that first prompted my interest in the subject) and one from the Prince Edward Island Court of Appeal (h/t […] Read more

In his London School of Economics Ph.D. thesis, Dean Knight offers an interesting theoretical perspective on judicial review doctrine. Grouping writers and judges into four broad groups, ranging from those who prefer more formalistic, bounded approaches to those who embrace thorough contextual inquiry, he assesses each group against Lon Fuller’s ‘internal morality of law’. Knight’s […] Read more

My preoccupation with the internal standard of review issue has led me to wonder whether it would even be constitutionally permissible for a Canadian legislature to require an administrative body to conduct judicial reviews. The idea is not entirely far-fetched: the UK’s new tribunal system has just this feature, with the Upper Tribunal required on […] Read more

I made a presentation last week to the members of the new Refugee Appeal Division and their legal advisers. The RAD hears appeals from the Refugee Protection Division: most of the relevant statutory provisions are contained in Part IV of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. One of the questions the members of the RAD […] Read more

Volochay v. College of Massage Therapists of Ontario, 2012 ONCA 541, involves a masseur, (alleged) extra-marital sex, (alleged) intimidation of a witness and (allegedly) a vengeful government agency. A story interesting enough, then, to survive even the following injection of administrative law principles.A former patient of the applicant’s made a complaint against him, on the […] Read more

I have posted “Vavilov on the Road” to SSRN. Here is the abstract: In this paper, I draw attention to recent cases and issues arising from the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2019 reformulation of administrative law principles in Vavilov. These recent materials either confirm the direction of travel or require slight adjustments to keep things […] Read more