Readers may be interested by Professor Richard Fentiman KC’s Queens’ Distinguished Lecture in Law delivered at Queens’ College, Cambridge a few weeks ago. His title was “Citadels of the Law: Law Schools and the Defence of Doctrine” and the whole thing is well worth your time: On the same theme, Professor Jason Varuhas has an […] Read more

In Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada v. Entertainment Software Association, 2022 SCC 30, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized a “rare” and “exceptional” new category of matters requiring correctness review, namely “when courts and administrative bodies have concurrent first instance jurisdiction over a legal issue in a statute” (at para. 28). […] Read more

With co-author Brandon Orct I prepared the country report on Canada for the “Artficial Intelligence Accountability” stream for this year’s General Congress of the International Academy for Comparative Law. Our report is available now on SSRN: This is the country report on “Artificial Intelligence Accountability” prepared in respect of Canada for the International Academy of […] Read more

With my excellent former research assistant, Kseniya Kudischeva, I have prepared a chapter for a forthcoming volume edited by Anne Carter and Joe Tomlinson on Facts in Public Law Adjudication. Our chapter is “The Rise of Facts in Public Law“: In Commonwealth jurisdictions, judges have traditionally been reluctant to grapple with factual issues in public […] Read more

The Public Order Emergency Commission chaired by Justice Paul Rouleau of the Ontario Court of Appeal has been up and running for the past few weeks. The Commission is established under s. 63 of the Emergencies Act: The Governor in Council shall, within sixty days after the expiration or revocation of a declaration of emergency, […] Read more

Those of you planning to attend ‘year in review’ sessions in the coming weeks and months will no doubt be pleased to learn that Justice Stratas has updated his invaluable “The Canadian Law of Judicial Review: Some Doctrine and Cases“, available on SSRN: It is hard to find a useful, up-to-date summary of the Canadian […] Read more

It is the Fall and as the leaves fall so too are forests felled to print the annual ‘year in review’ papers. I have posted my annual update on the Supreme Court of Canada’s administrative law jurisprudence to SSRN: This paper focuses on the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2022 administrative law jurisprudence. This year marked […] Read more

This is an extract from my paper “A Defence of Administrative Law Doctrine“ I argued in Part II that administrative law doctrine is not empty, as it precludes judicial conclusions in concrete cases. In this Part, I will argue that administrative law doctrine is not pernicious either. Setting out a systemic conception of doctrine is […] Read more

I have not had as much time as I would like recently to pursue my research interests in the regulation of social media platforms. Before the pandemic, I wrote favourably of the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel: What are the social media behemoths — Facebook, Google, Netflix, Twitter, Youtube, etc — that have come […] Read more

This is an extract from my paper “A Defence of Administrative Law Doctrine“ Professor Allan’s third proposition is that there are no general principles of judicial review. Indeed, the very proposition that general principles give administrative law a “genuine sense” is “actually a contradiction in terms”.[1] As a “body of doctrine”, administrative law lacks “any […] Read more