Last month the Quebec Court of Appeal handed down its opinion in the Renvoi à la Cour d’appel du Québec portant sur la validité constitutionnelle des dispositions de l’article 35 du Code de procédure civile qui fixent à moins de 85 000 $ la compétence pécuniaire exclusive de la Cour du Québec et sur la […] Read more

In two important recent decisions, Canadian courts have had to consider the lawfulness of internal administrative arrangements designed to promote consistent decision-making. On both occasions, the arrangements ran afoul of the principles of administrative law. In Shuttleworth v. Ontario (Safety, Licensing Appeals and Standards Tribunals), 2019 ONCA 518 a process of peer review of draft […] Read more

I’m grateful to Radio Canada and the hosts of the Stereo Decisis podcast for giving me the opportunity to speak about the Case of Prorogations [2019] UKSC 41 this week. As it happens the decision was handed down on my birthday, which was quite the present. I’ve embedded the Stereo Decisis discussion here: And here […] Read more

Brexit provided more grist for the public law mill this morning with the UK Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in R (Miller) v Prime Minister [2019] UKSC 41. In a judgment written by Lady Hale and Lord Reed, the Court held, first, that Prime Minister Johnson’s advice to prorogue Parliament was unlawful and, second, that the […] Read more

When I lectured administrative law at the University of Cambridge, I received one question from the floor in three years. (Students have fortnightly small-group supervisions, so tend to save their inquiries for their supervisors.) I regularly asked the students if they had any questions and sometimes jokingly complained that they were too shy. This machismo […] Read more

One of the issues which recurred in the UK Supreme Court’s hearing of the prorogation litigation this week (see my posts here, here and here) was whether the grounds of review applied to exercises of statutory powers are equally applicable to prerogative powers. The Court’s previous decision in R (Sandiford) v Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary […] Read more

In a bombshell judgment last week, the Inner House of the Court of Session unanimously held in Cherry v Advocate General [2019] CSIH 49 that Prime Minister Johnson’s advice to prorogue Parliament was unlawful. Eleven judges of the UK Supreme Court will begin hearing the prorogation litigation tomorrow, with submissions to be spread over three […] Read more

In 2010, I wrote an article in Public Law which is newly relevant because of court challenges to Boris Johnson’s advice to the Queen to prorogue Parliament. I’ve uploaded the paper to SSRN. Here is the abstract: In this paper, published in 2010 but relevant again as the UK courts consider the lawfulness of Boris […] Read more

I found the decision of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales in Ofsted v Secretary of State for Education [2018] EWCA Civ 2813 to be a nice illustration of two important phenomena: first, the extent to which administrators internalize the norms generated by judicial development of the principles of judicial review of administrative […] Read more

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