I have posted my paper, “The Appellate Standard of Review in Public Law Cases” to SSRN. It will be published next year in Public Law. Here is the introduction: The goal of this paper is to conduct a comparative discussion of the issue of the appellate standard of review in public law cases. On this […] Read more

On three occasions this summer the governmental bodies in the United Kingdom have withdrawn or substantially modified decision-making processes which relied on the production of automated decisions by algorithms. In the areas of immigration, welfare and benefit administration, and examination grading, the bodies involved have effected u-turns. Taken together, the three episodes demonstrate the limitations […] Read more

As regular readers will know, I have been maintaining a standing entry on the pan-Canadian rollout of the Vavilov framework for judicial review of administrative action. An official version of “Vavilov Hits the Road” appeared as a supplement to Colleen Flood and Lorne Sossin eds., Administrative Law in Context (3rd ed., 2018): download it here. […] Read more

Today, Canada’s Parliament was prorogued by the Governor General until September 23 on the advice of the Prime Minister. In this post I will consider whether there might be plausible grounds for challenging this prorogation in the courts. My goal is not to incite any such challenge but rather to demonstrate the potentially far-reaching implications […] Read more

Last week’s Supreme Court of Canada decision in British Columbia (Attorney General) v. Provincial Court Judges’ Association of British Columbia, 2020 SCC 20 is most important for what it says about some relatively niche issues of Canadian public law but it also touches on broader matters, such as the relationship between procedure and substance in […] Read more

The British government has published the terms of an Independent Review of Administrative Law, to be conducted by a panel of illustrious legal experts, including academics Carol Harlow, Alan Page and Nick McBride: 1. Whether the amenability of public law decisions to judicial review by the courts and the grounds of public law illegality should […] Read more

The Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium is a series of seminars with world-leading experts on public law, who will discuss their scholarship in depth in sessions chaired by Professor Paul Daly, the University Research Chair in Administrative Law & Governance. Attendance is open to all. The Colloquium’s Directed Research Project can be taken for 3 […] Read more

Vulnerable: The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19, edited by Colleen M. Flood, Vanessa MacDonnell, Jane Philpott, Sophie Thériault and Sridhar Venkatapuram has just been published by the University of Ottawa Press. Download the whole book for free here. It is remarkable to see this peer-reviewed collection in print less than three months after contributors […] Read more

Since the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Vavilov, I have given a number of presentations to administrative tribunal members on the implications of the revised understanding of reasonableness review. Here is the heart of the presentation, focusing on four key post-Vavilov issues In Vavilov, the majority identifies “two types of fundamental flaws…that may show […] Read more

I am very happy to say that my project on machine learning in public administration is going to be funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The most recent list of Insight grant awards is here. Regular readers will have seen some of this material before but I thought it would be worth […] Read more