internal standard of review | Page 5

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Vavilov On the Road

In the first year after Vavilov was released, I read pretty well every decision in which the Supreme Court of Canada’s reformulation of administrative law was cited. The result was “One Year of Vavilov” and a soon-to-appear chapter in Colleen Flood and Paul Daly eds., Administrative Law in Context, 4th ed.  Since then, I have been less assiduous in […] Read more

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Tribunal Competence and Expertise

Here is my blog post on the doctrinal law relating to tribunal competence and expertise for the Tribunal Watch Ontario/Windsor Law webinar on independence and impartiality. Here is what Tribunal Watch Ontario’s Statement of Principles says Adjudicators must be optimally competent and the tribunal equally competent in the exercise of its mandate. Adjudicators must have […] Read more

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Exam Season

I am currently knee-deep in exam scripts, having taught Administrative Law twice in the Winter Term (once in English, once in French). I thought readers might be interested in taking a look at the final exam I set (70%, with a mid-term accounting for the other 30%). A is an inmate in a federal penitentiary. […] Read more

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The Inner Morality of Administrative Adjudication

If we want to develop a morality of administrative tribunal adjudication, we need to look elsewhere than the law of judicial review, with its concern for clamping down on “bad” decision-making. Imagine instead a “good” administrative adjudicator concerned about the acceptability of their decisions to the individuals appearing before them and to Canadian society: they […] Read more

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Plural Public Law: Relevance and Influence

I gave my inaugural lecture as the University Research Chair in Administrative Law at the University of Ottawa last month. You can watch the lecture here (after some introductory remarks from Dean Sylvestre, Chief Justice Wagner and Justice Bich). The comments from my respondents, Justice Stratas and Professor Cartier can be found here. This is […] Read more

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Human Rights in Administrative Decision-making II: Organizational and Ontological Reasons for the Inevitability of Administrative Discretion and Judgement

This is the second post in a series. The first post can be found here. Even if we were to allow, for the sake of argument, that statutory provisions are always clear, discretion and judgement could not be eliminated from administrative decision-making. With respect to the administration of statutes – their implementation by front-line officials […] Read more

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And Now, Live from the Public-Private Divide…R (Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party) v ITV Broadcasting Ltd [2019] EWHC 3282 (Admin)

Britain is currently in the throes of a general election in which, an unkind Transatlantic observer might say, the question for many voters is ‘who is the evil of two lessers?’ It is quite likely, indeed almost certain, that Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn will be occupying 10 Downing Street come January 1, 2020, notwithstanding […] Read more

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Thinking about Administrative Justice: the Power of Mashaw’s Models

There are many available definitions of administrative justice, a term which “has, until recently, been shrouded in obscurity”[1] and provoked “considerable disagreement”.[2] On the one hand, the term can be used to denote “the justice inherent in decision making”,[3] or “those qualities of decision making process that provide arguments for the acceptability of its decisions”.[4] […] Read more