A new edition of Grant Gilmore’s classic Storrs Lectures, The Ages of American Law, was published recently with a new postscript by Philip Bobbitt. Gilmore left American law in the “Age of Anxiety”, an era in which I fear Americans remain, although Bobbitt makes a powerful case for the emergence of an “Age of Consent”. […] Read more

Nzolameso v. City of Westminster, [2015] UKSC 22 is a case about a technical area of law — local housing authorities’ duties to house homeless persons — but which contains interesting passages on reasoned decisions and administrative guidelines. N was evicted from a private property in Westminster and applied for local authority housing. The authority […] Read more

Long-time readers of this blog know I never really thought context had been eradicated by the simplification project which the Supreme Court of Canada began in Dunsmuir: see, e.g. my 2012 articles here and here. Standard of review issues continue to cause disquiet on lower courts around the country. Once a case does not fall […] Read more

When an administrative decision-maker hears argument but decides a point on another ground, what is the appropriate posture of a reviewing court? Is this a matter of procedural fairness, because it goes to the ability of the parties to make full and complete submissions, or is it a matter of substantive reasonableness, because it goes […] Read more

Andy Grewal had an interesting post on the Notice and Comment blog last week on a D.C. Circuit decision holding that the canon against extraterritorial interpretation of statutes trumps Chevron deference (though also suggesting that if the agency turned its mind to the canon its reasoned position might survive review). Grewal comments, astutely: Yet recent […] Read more

As of June 1, I will be Associate Dean (Faculty Affairs and Professional Development) and Faculty Secretary, Faculté de droit, Université de Montréal, as part of the team put in place by our incoming Dean, Jean-François GaudreaultDesBiens, to help to execute the reform mandate he has been given by the university authorities. So, the next […] Read more

The challenge to non-appointments to the Canadian Senate survived a motion to strike last week in Alani v. Canada (Prime Minister), 2015 FC 649. Harrington J. rejected — for the moment — government arguments based on justiciability and jurisdiction. On justiciability, Harrington J. concluded: [36]           Without a doubt there is a political […] Read more

There is a fascinating story in the New York Times about judicial decision-making, in particular, whether it is appropriate for judges to seek out the advice of their colleagues: Interviews with more than a dozen judges in Manhattan’s Federal District Court show that almost all have telephoned colleagues when they were puzzled by legal questions […] Read more

This is the fourth and final post excerpting from my paper on stare decisis in Canadian administrative law for the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice’s 2015 National Roundtable on Administrative Law (Moncton, Friday, May 22*): Consistency in Tribunal Decision-Making. You can read the first, second and third posts here, here and here. * This […] Read more

An old advertisement for Beamish, a tipple manufactured in my native Cork, not far from my alma mater, has the punchline: “Consistent, that’s why it’s different”. One of the advantages of relaxing the rules of stare decisis for administrative tribunals is that it allows decision-makers to change positions in response to shifts in facts, be they economic, […] Read more