On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Canada will deliver its decisions in the long-awaited trilogy of cases heard last December: Vavilov v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) (Federal Court, 2015 FC 960; Federal Court of Appeal, 2017 FCA 132); Bell Canada v Canada (Attorney General) (Federal Court of Appeal, 2017 FCA 249); and National Football League […] Read more

The reading lists for the Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium 2020 have been finalized. You can find more information on the Colloquium here (which also has the course code CML 3351 for uOttawa students). The seminars are open to all and the reading lists are designed to help you, before or after the seminar, to […] Read more

A few months ago, Facebook published its Oversight Board Charter. Faced with mounting pressure about its treatment of complaints about its content moderation decisions, the company’s response was to create an Oversight Board: The purpose of the board is to protect free expression by making principled, independent decisions about important pieces of content and by […] Read more

This is the second post in a series. The first post can be found here. Even if we were to allow, for the sake of argument, that statutory provisions are always clear, discretion and judgement could not be eliminated from administrative decision-making. With respect to the administration of statutes – their implementation by front-line officials […] Read more

To mark the 60th anniversary of ANU Law and the 30th anniversary of the Centre for International and Public Law (CIPL), a major public law conference will be held at the Australian National University in Canberra, on 8-9 December 2020. Full details can be accessed here. Conference theme: Public Law and Inequality Growing inequality is a defining challenge of our times, domestically […] Read more

In their excellent book Reimagining Administrative Justice: Human Rights in Small Places (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) (discussed here) Margaret Doyle and Nick O’Brien attack what they perceive as a neoliberal, individualistic turn in thinking about human rights and administrative justice. No quarter is given by the authors to those they consider responsible, one of whom is […] Read more

Britain is currently in the throes of a general election in which, an unkind Transatlantic observer might say, the question for many voters is ‘who is the evil of two lessers?’ It is quite likely, indeed almost certain, that Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn will be occupying 10 Downing Street come January 1, 2020, notwithstanding […] Read more

In Reimagining Administrative Justice: Human Rights in Small Places (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) Margaret Doyle and Nick O’Brien have made a wonderful contribution to the public law literature. By turns playful, polemical and provocative, the authors set out to challenge much of the received contemporary wisdom about administrative justice. Their motive is to fight back against […] Read more

I have posted my “year in review” paper to SSRN. The title is “Waiting for Godot: Canadian Administrative Law in 2019“. Here is the abstract: The first half of my “year in review” paper covers the Supreme Court’s much-anticipated trilogy of decisions on the standard of review of administrative action (Part I); some of the […] Read more