Last Friday the Supreme Court of Canada cleared the way (at last) for a national securities regulator. In Reference re Pan‑Canadian Securities Regulation, 2018 SCC 48, on appeal from a reference to the Quebec Court of Appeal by the provincial government, the Court advised that the legislative and regulatory system envisaged by the Cooperative Capital […] Read more

A hundred-odd years ago, Farwell LJ noted that the emerging concept of declaratory relief can provide “a speedy and easy access to the Courts for any of His Majesty’s subjects who have any real cause of complaint against the exercise of statutory powers by Government departments and Government officials…” (Dyson v Attorney-General (No. 1) [1911] […] Read more

Doubts are gathering about the future of Chevron deference in the United States. Before he retired from the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Kennedy expressed some concerns about Chevron; two state supreme courts (Wisconsin and Mississippi) have materially reduced the deference they give to administrative interpretations of law; Justice Scalia, a strong defender […] Read more

In August, I posted on an interesting and potentially very important United Kingdom Supreme Court decision on appellate standards of review. In R (AR) v Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police [2018] UKSC 48, Lord Carnwath concluded for a unanimous court that in an appeal from an application by the High Court of the proportionality […] Read more

On Saturday, October 20, the Centre for Public Law at the University of Cambridge, is hosting a symposium on the Privacy International litigation. Those interested in attending should email me. Contributors will also be writing short blog posts summarising their presentations, for the Administrative Law in the Common Law World blog. As regular readers will […] Read more

Under the “Carltona principle”, decisions taken in reality by civil servants in a government department are treated in law as decisions of the responsible minister, such that where a statute provides for decisions to be made by a “minister” it is lawful for a civil servant to take them in the minister’s stead (see here […] Read more

Back in 2012 I posted about a paper by Sean Rehaag which identified “wild variations in the treatment of leave and judicial review applications by different Federal Court judges”. Reforms to the leave and judicial review process followed. Professor Rehaag has now returned with a new study, “Revisiting the Luck of the Draw“, covering an […] Read more

A full review of this book will appear in the November issue of the Cambridge Law Journal Administrative law aficionados often find themselves asking existential questions. Should administrative lawyers focus on judicial review – the control by the ordinary courts of administrative action – or should they focus on the internal workings of the administration? […] Read more

I was in London today at a Chillin’ Competition event at the London School of Economics to mark the publication of The Shaping of EU Competition Law by Pablo Ibanez Colomo, where I commented on the administrative law matters raised by the book. As you will see, I think this is an important piece of […] Read more

Two recent cases, one from Canada and one from New Zealand, suggest that a  useful distinction can be made between excluding and channeling judicial review of administrative action. Legislatures often interfere with the supervisory jurisdiction of the superior courts, sometimes to eliminate it altogether (excluding), but more often to regulate it, for instance by imposing […] Read more