This is the first of three posts on the EU (Withdrawal) Bill: see my introduction to the series here. This is a work in progress, so any and all comments are very welcome. There are several conceptual problems with the Bill: first, it is not clear what “retained EU law” is; second, the point at […] Read more

UPDATE: You can now read all the posts in the series, first on the conceptual problems, then on the substantive problems, and finally on the procedural problems. The European Union (Withdrawal) Bill is currently making its way through Parliament. Unsurprisingly, the Bill survived Second Reading. Unsurprisingly, because failure to legislate for Brexit would cause chaos […] Read more

Readers may be interested in listening to Professor Denis Baranger’s Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow Lecture at the Melbourne Law School. A helpful summary is available here: In his lecture, Professor Baranger contended that “you don’t get to understand public law by searching for its foundations, but by identifying its boundaries.” With this contention as a […] Read more

Gillian Metzger and Kevin Stack’s article “Internal Administrative Law” can be accessed at the Michigan Law Review‘s website. Here is the abstract: For years, administrative law has been identified as the external review of agency action, primarily by courts. Following in the footsteps of pioneering administrative law scholars, a growing body of recent scholarship has […] Read more

I hope to start blogging more regularly in the coming weeks, as we are gearing up for a return to Term time here at Cambridge. I thought it might be useful to give you all an overview of my current and upcoming and projects, many of which will appear in some form in this forum. […] Read more

Another excerpt from my work on Hogan and Morgan’s Administrative Law in Ireland follows, this time attempting to distinguish between mandatory and directory statutory provisions. Warning: this analysis may not survive its imminent encounter with my co-authors! Thoughts welcome, especially from those who have to walk the mandatory/directory line in other jurisdictions. ——— When the […] Read more

Some of the contretemps between the UK Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights produce more heat than light. Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights has been a persistent source of discord for the last decade or so. The most recent exhibit is Poshteh v Royal Borough of Kensington & […] Read more

Judicial disagreement in administrative law cases is nothing new and nothing remarkable. Canadian judges have been disagreeing with each other — often at inordinate length — about the “standard of review” for over 30 years. But there are several remarkable features of the Supreme Court of Canada’s latest foray into standard of review in Quebec […] Read more

The UK Supreme Court’s decision today in R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51 contains a fascinating discussion of the principles relating to vires review of delegated legislation that infringes on fundamental rights. There is much that will be of interest to public lawyers around the Commonwealth. At issue was whether fees imposed in […] Read more

Deference doctrines have a tendency to wax and wane in their application. In Canada, exceptions to the general presumption of reasonableness review of administrative interpretations of law are stubbornly tenacious and, sometimes, reasonableness review is applied in such a non-deferential way as to invite accusations that the reviewing courts is engaged in “disguised correctness review”. […] Read more