At the behest of Canadian Heritage and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, I have authored a report, Best Practices in Administrative Decision-Making: Viewing the Copyright Board of Canada in a Comparative Light, with a viewing to contributing to the 2017 five-year legislative review of Canada’s Copyright Act. Download it here. Here is the abstract: […] Read more

I have posted before on unsuccessful efforts, in Australia and Canada, to invoke statistical evidence in order to demonstrate bias on the part of an administrative decision-maker. In the Australian and Canadian scenarios, the claims of bias were based on evidence showing that immigration officials invariably rejected asylum applications. An interesting recent Irish case, C.S.B […] Read more

I am really delighted to say that from October 1, I will be a Senior Lecturer in Public Law at the University of Cambridge. I have been hired to teach administrative law; the position opened up because of the impending retirement (from his university position only) of Professor Christopher Forsyth. There are very few places […] Read more

Netflix, Inc. v. Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada, 2015 FCA 289 is a useful illustration of some of the problems caused by judicial intervention on an intrusive standard on procedural matters. At issue was a tariff certified by the Copyright Board that imposed a monthly minimal fee for free trial periods […] Read more

I have been following, via Trinity Western University School of Law’s invaluable Twitter feed, proceedings at the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal: I posted on the first-instance decision here. The questions from the bench on Day One did not augur particularly well for the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society, but the judges have also probed the […] Read more

There are several recent English decisions on an interesting question: to what extent can courts adjudicating private law disputes look behind official credentials and determine whether diplomatic immunity applies? The basic issues are outlined well by Philippa Webb in this post on EJIL: Talk! In both cases, as Dr. Webb explains, several facts suggest that […] Read more

Blogging has been slow recently, as you have doubtless noticed. We are coming up to the end of term here in Montreal, so the administrative load has been heavier than usual, and I have also completed a report for a government department on the functioning of an administrative agency (about which I will have much […] Read more

Even in the good old days when judicial review of administrative action was organized around readily identifiable poles such as “judicial” and “administrative” decisions, lawyers engaged in all manner of “verbal gymnastics” to contort their cases into a more favourable category (SA de Smith, Judicial Review of Administrative Action, 1st ed., 1961). In an administrative […] Read more

Before Christmas, I posted some thoughts on s. 96 of the Constitution Act, 1867 (see e.g. here and here). I have just finished revising my paper, which will appear in an edited collection about which I hope to say more soon. Here is the additional material I inserted in the last section, about how Canadian […] Read more