Dr. Eddie Clark, Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington I am, in general, a fan of the instinct that drove Dunsmuir.  The notion that that some administrative decisions might require stricter scrutiny than others is a good one.  The idea to make the calibration of this level of scrutiny an explicit part of the […] Read more

The Honourable Joseph T. Robertson, Q.C., formerly of the Federal Court of Appeal (1992-2000), the New Brunswick Court of Appeal (2000-2014) and Jurist-in-Residence with the Faculty of Law, University of New Brunswick (2014-2017). This digital symposium marks the 10th Anniversary of Dunsmuir v New Brunswick.[1] Undoubtedly, attention will focus on whether this “transformative” decision has […] Read more

Nicolas Lambert, Faculté de droit, Université de Moncton If two administrative lawyers met in a bar, chances are they would succeed in having a conversation in which no one but them would understand what is being discussed. Another likely possibility is that even if they agreed with each other politically and morally, their ways of […] Read more

Andrew Green is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto In Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick[i], the Supreme Court of Canada attempted to re-structure administrative law to more fully recognize legislative supremacy, maintain the court’s role in ensuring legality and, at the same time, reduce the costs of making administrative law decisions.  […] Read more

I smiled as I read the email from Léonid Sirota. Why not, he asked, mark the 10th anniversary of Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, with a series of blog posts running up to March 9, 2018? Why not, indeed? Standard of review has an addictive quality and a good part of Canada’s legal community has long […] Read more

In the Supreme Court of Canada’s latest administrative law decision — Delta Air Lines Inc. v. Lukács, 2018 SCC 2 — it attempted to give some guidance on the relationship between reasons and reasonableness in judicial review cases. It seems like signal rather than noise. There are two interesting aspects, one on the legitimacy of […] Read more

It may be hard to believe that March 7, 2018 marks the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Dunsmuir v New Brunswick, where the Court reformulated Canadian administrative law. Dunsmuir is — by some distance — the most cited decision of any Canadian court and, for Canadians and Canadaphiles, synonymous with […] Read more

The orthodoxy in English administrative law circles is that ouster clauses are unlikely ever to be effective. The underlying logic of the majority of the House of Lords in the landmark case of Anisminic v Foreign Compensation Commission [1969] 2 AC 147 is that an ouster clause does not protect an unlawful decision from judicial […] Read more

There are some recent empirical studies of deference in administrative law that may be of interest to readers, some on Canada and one on England and Wales. In “Quantifying Dunsmuir: An Empirical Analysis of the Supreme Court of Canada’s Jurisprudence on Standard of Review” (2016) 66 UTLJ 555, Robert Danay tests the hypothesis (advanced by […] Read more