An interesting decision from the Federal Court of Canada today, the latest installment in a long-running labour relations saga at Canada Post.The Conservative federal government intervened last year to compel Canada Post workers to go back on the job. One component of the back-to-work legislation was that a “final offer” arbitrator would be appointed. Both […] Read more

An individual aggrieved by a governmental decision may have two choices: sue the government for damages, or seek judicial review. Some of the most difficult questions in administrative law arise on the border between a civil suit (private law) and judicial review (public law).Over at the UK Human Rights blog, David Hart Q.C. has an […] Read more

Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency won a High Court legal battle against Treasury Holdings earlier this week, but it may end up losing the war. Finlay Geoghegan J.’s judgment, [2012] IEHC 297, cannot have been well received at NAMA headquarters. Over at NAMA Wine Lake, the editors wonder out loud “if indeed the Agency is […] Read more

Karole Cuddihy passes along an interesting Irish High Court decision. In the following passage, from EMI Records (Ireland) Ltd. v. The Data Protection Commissioner, [2012] IEHC 264, the ever-reliable Charleton J. describes the place of deference in Irish law. I think it also functions as a serviceable description of prevailing English law: 5.0 Only in […] Read more

Nothing new under the sun is to be found in Spirit Airlines v. Department of Transportation, but the facts are interesting.Although the U.S. air transportation market is largely deregulated, DOT retains the authority to prohibit “unfair or deceptive practice[s] . . . in air transportation or the sale of air transportation”. They issued a new […] Read more

The UK Supreme Court decided two very interesting immigration cases the week before last, touching on two very interesting issues.The first issue was whether the royal prerogative in respect of immigration control had been ousted by the Immigration Act, 1971. That Act seems to be expressed in permissive terms. It allows, but does not require, […] Read more

The Working Group on EU Administrative Law of Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs recently reported on the desirability of an EU-wide code of administrative procedure along the lines of America’s Administrative Procedure Act (or Ontario’s Statutory Powers Procedure Act).Interestingly, the Committee accepts that ‘soft law’ — internal policy, expressed in a variety of non-binding forms […] Read more

I have a guest post over on the UK Constitutional Law Group’s blog explaining the utility of the approach to judicial review outlined in A Theory of Deference in Administrative Law to one of the most rancourous debates in common law academia. You can check it out here. Read more

Adrian Vermeule has an engaging new paper on Agency Independence. Here’s the abstract: It is often said that the legal touchstone of agency independence is whether the agency head or heads are removable at will, or only for cause. Yet this test does not adequately describe the landscape of agency independence. There are many important […] Read more

My colleague Daniel Turp led a spirited challenge to the federal government’s decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. Spirited and all as the challenge was, it failed before the Federal Court.The key plank in the argument was legislation that came into force in 2007, the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act. As s. 3 of the […] Read more