Commentary on developments in administrative law, particularly judicial review of administrative action by common law courts.
Registration for this year’s Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium is now open: register here. The topic for the 2023 edition will be “The Legitimacy of the State”: The legitimacy of contemporary liberal democratic states is in a state of flux. Managing the effects of globalization, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and fighting escalating inflation have […] Read more
Having described in previous posts the limited content of the record for judicial review purposes in Canada (here and here), I turn now to critical analysis. I will suggest in this post that a limited record can undermine judicial review by preventing courts from performing their constitutionality duty of assessing the lawfulness of administrative action […] Read more
I have written a paper entitled, “How Binding are Binding Guidelines? An Analytical Framework” to be published later this year in Canadian Public Administration. You can access a pre-publication version here. In a previous post, I introduced the paper. In this post, I explain the first indicium of bindingness: the presence or absence of imperative […] Read more
The next guest in this year’s Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium will be Professor Robert Thomas (University of Manchester) on Tuesday March 21 at 11.30 eastern time via Zoom (note that the clocks changed in Canada last week so the time difference with Europe is an hour less than usual). Professor Thomas will be discussing […] Read more
On March 29 next, the University of Ottawa is holding a one-day conference to discuss the report of the Rouleau Commission into the invocation of the Emergencies Act by the federal government in 2022. I will be participating as a panelist. If time allows I will post my thoughts on the report and its relationship […] Read more
I am giving a talk at the School of Law, National University of Mongolia next week during their Fourth Annual Conference on Issues in Constitutional and Administrative Law, on the topic of state-owned enterprises. Here are my thoughts… Why Crown Corporations? Crown corporations are “structural heretics”, designed to function as commercial players but to achieve […] Read more
I have written a paper entitled, “How Binding are Binding Guidelines? An Analytical Framework” to be published later this year in Canadian Public Administration. You can access a pre-publication version here. I will be posting the paper in parts over the coming weeks. Here are the introductory sections: Guidelines play an important role in contemporary […] Read more
The next speaker in this year’s Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium will be Professor Joseph Heath (University of Toronto). Professor Heath will be discussing his book The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State (OUP, 2020): In political theory, the traditional model of state power was that elected officials make policy decisions which […] Read more
Last September I participated in a University of Toronto symposium on the career of Justice Rosalie Abella. The papers from the symposium are to be published in the University of Toronto Law Journal. A pre-publication version of my piece, “The Autonomy of Administration“, is now available for download on SSRN: Justice Rosalie Abella is closely […] Read more
In previous posts (here and here) I have introduced the concept of the duty of candour in judicial review proceedings and described the centrality of the ‘record’ to judicial review of administrative action. In this post, I will consider several barriers to disclosure of relevant information which further limit the content of the record and […] Read more
In a recent interview with Yves Faguy for CBA/ABC National, the Chief Justice of Canada, Richard Wagner, was asked about the risk that courts would ‘backslide’ into old practices and give up some of the technological advances made during the COVID-19 pandemic: N: You co-chaired the Action Committee on Court Operations in Response to COVID-19, which […] Read more