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

President Obama recently announced a significant policy of non-enforcement of immigration law aimed at protecting the position of illegal immigrants who are on a ‘pathway’ to citizenship. There is an excellent symposium at Jack Balkin’s blog, accessible here. Simply put, President Obama’s argument is that the legislative branch has not allocated sufficient resources to apply […] Read more

The topic of enforcement discretion is the subject of an interesting series of posts by Zachary Price over at the Volokh Conspiracy. The impetus for Price’s series and his underlying article (“Enforcement Discretion and Executive Duty“) comes from several recent American episodes, such as President Obama’s decision not to enforce certain provisions of the Affordable […] Read more

The recent UK Supreme Court decision in Osborn v. The Parole Board, [2013] UKSC 61 has already provoked interesting commentary on the relationship between the common law of procedural fairness and the European Convention on Human Rights. I have nothing to add to that commentary, but one of the things I find interesting about Osborn […] Read more

An interesting new paper by Michigan’s Nicholas Bagley: The presumption in favor of judicial review of agency action is a cornerstone of administrative law, accepted by courts and commentators alike as both legally appropriate and obviously desirable. Yet the presumption is puzzling. As with any canon of statutory construction that serves a substantive end, it […] Read more

What should a government do when its system for processing immigration applications has ground almost to a halt and is no longer fit for purpose? The Canadian government tried reforming its “foreign skilled worker programme” on several occasions, to no avail. It ultimately enacted the following provision, s. 87.4 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection […] Read more

My paper for this Saturday’s conference at the University of Ottawa in honour of Justice Charron is now available on SSRN. You can download it here. To whet your appetite, here is the abstract: In interpreting the “prescribed by law” requirement contained in section 1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadian courts have […] Read more

At first blush, the result in North End Community Health Association v. Halifax (Regional Municipality), 2012 NSSC 330 is striking. A municipality’s decision to sell an old school to a property developer was held to be unlawful because it breached a duty of fairness to local non-profit organizations and because it was sold at less […] Read more