The term “quasi-constitutional” is sometimes attached to statutes said or held to have special status relative to other statutes. Typically, the “quasi-constitutional” statute is one which protects or seeks to entrench important individual rights. But there is no reason that only statutes concerned with rights should be eligible for the “quasi-constitutional” label (see Vanessa MacDonnell). […] Read more

On the advice of Britain’s new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, the Queen signed an Order in Council last week proroguing Parliament from a point between September 9 and September 12 until October 14. A political storm has erupted in the United Kingdom and three court challenges have been launched or accelerated in response. Attention is […] Read more

Anti-administrativists have not had a good couple of weeks. For the past few years, the administrative state in the United States has been under sustained attack, traduced as illegitimate and a betrayal of the commitments of the Founding Fathers. Too often, however, the arguments of the anti-administrativists portray a cartoonish version of modern public administration, […] Read more

My worst nightmare (which, admittedly, is a little bit different from the nocturnal terrors feared by most people) has just come to pass. Yesterday Professor Larry Solum extracted on his Legal Theory blog a piece from a recent article of mine and labelled it “puzzling”. Here is the offending passage (from this article): What Chevron […] Read more

For the second time in six months, the Supreme Court of Canada has released a decision in a judicial review case brought by an applicant seeking a procedural solution to a substantive problem. In Canada (Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness) v. Chhina, 2019 SCC 29, as in R. v. Bird, 2019 SCC 7 (noted here), […] Read more

The United Kingdom Supreme Court handed down its decision in R (Privacy International) v Investigatory Powers Tribunal [2019] UKSC 22 this morning. There are four judgments: a plurality judgment by Lord Carnwath (with whom Lady Hale and Lord Kerr concur) and dissenting judgments by Lord Sumption (with whom Lord Reed concurs) and Lord Wilson. There is […] Read more

After three extraordinarily happy years in Cambridge, I am moving back to Canada, where I will seek to repay the University of Ottawa’s faith in me as a legal scholar, as the University Research Chair in Administrative Law & Governance. The University’s announcement can be found here, with more details on the website of the […] Read more

The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement was concluded in 2006, settling class actions brought against the Government of Canada and religious organizations by those who suffered abuse in residential schools. Over a period of almost 150 years, around 150,000 young First Nations, Inuit and Métis children attended Indian Residential Schools run by religious orders and […] Read more

As all but the newest readers of this blog are aware, the Supreme Court of Canada should, sometime this year, release a trilogy of decisions intended to clarify the Canadian law of standard of review. It is by now very clear that the stakes are quite high. A tour of recent appellate and first-instance decisions […] Read more