I posted earlier this year about divergent approaches on Canadian courts of appeal to the application of the deferential standard of reasonableness to administrative interpretations of law. There was, on the one hand, the aggressive use by the British Columbia Court of Appeal of the principles of statutory interpretation to determine the best possible reading […] Read more

In a bombshell judgment last week, the Inner House of the Court of Session unanimously held in Cherry v Advocate General [2019] CSIH 49 that Prime Minister Johnson’s advice to prorogue Parliament was unlawful. Eleven judges of the UK Supreme Court will begin hearing the prorogation litigation tomorrow, with submissions to be spread over three […] Read more

Doubts are gathering about the future of Chevron deference in the United States. Under sustained attack from the forces of judicial supremacy on matters of legal interpretation and shorn of some of its strongest defenders, Chevron seems to be on the ropes. In this post, I will lay out some of the signs of doubt […] Read more

This is a guest post from Professor Audrey Macklin I represented the intervener Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers (CARL) before the Court in Vavilov.  I will not rehearse the contents of the factum or my oral argument. Suffice to say that that, as a colleague remarked to me, the Court appeared “completely nonplussed” by my […] Read more

In Re X, 2017 CanLII 33034 (CA IRB), an important case I missed when it was decided last year, the Refugee Appeal Division of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board sat as a three-member panel with a view to setting out general rules as to how the RAD should deal with appeals from the (first-instance) Refugee […] Read more

In the Supreme Court of Canada’s latest administrative law decision — Delta Air Lines Inc. v. Lukács, 2018 SCC 2 — it attempted to give some guidance on the relationship between reasons and reasonableness in judicial review cases. It seems like signal rather than noise. There are two interesting aspects, one on the legitimacy of […] Read more

Here is a long post on the relevance of administrative law values (see my articles, here and here) to the difficult issue of jurisdictional error in English administrative law. Comments welcome! A useful starting point for a discussion of jurisdictional error is the following proposition: “any grant of jurisdiction will necessarily include limits to the […] 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

Here is the final installment of my posts on rights protection in administrative law: you can also read posts one, two and three. My proposed “public law model” would draw on the strengths of administrative law and constitutional law. Abella J. was quite right to set out in Doré to try and draw on the […] Read more

I spoke last month on this topic at a conference organized by the National Judicial Institute. Some of you may be interested in the following, slightly amended synopsis of my remarks. I’ll have more to say on the last idea soon, but suffice it to say that there is a striking contrast between Rothstein J.’s […] Read more