In Dover District Council v CPRE Kent [2017] UKSC 79, Lord Carnwath offered some important observations on the duty to give reasons in administrative law. The underlying issue involved an application for planning permission in the Kent Downs, an Area of Outstanding Beauty. Against the advice of its professional advisers, the local authority granted the […] Read more

Many readers will be interested by this new paper by Sunstein and Vermeule, “The Morality of Administrative Law“: As it has been developed over a period of many decades, administrative law has acquired its own morality, closely related to what Lon Fuller described as the internal morality of law. Reflected in a wide array of […] Read more

Fear not, fellow Canadians, I have not forsaken judicial review of administrative action in the Great White North. The difficulty, as I set out in my paper “The Signal and the Noise“, is that most Supreme Court of Canada decisions on administrative law are significant only for the substantive areas of law they address and […] Read more

This post follows on from my post on “Jurisdictional Error and Administrative Law Values“… There have been many formulations of Wednesbury unreasonableness over the years. For present purposes, however, we can take Lord Greene MR’s description – “a decision…so unreasonable that no reasonable authority could ever have come to it” – as encapsulating the essence […] Read more

Michalak v General Medical Council [2017] UKSC 71 is an interesting case, involving both a narrow point of statutory interpretation and broad issues about the nature of judicial review of administrative action. The narrow point concerned s. 120(7) of the Equality Act. Where a complaint relating to discrimination by a qualifications body “may, by virtue […] Read more

Part 3. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here. In Canada the creative tension between the rule of law and democracy – constitutional principles recognised by the Supreme Court of Canada[1] – provides a crucible in which judicial review doctrine is formed. There is no ready equivalent in English administrative law, certainly none […] Read more

Part 2! This is a long post. Those familiar with the details of recent developments in England and Canada should skip to the last section, “Explaining Convergence”. For Part I, see here. The period of post-Anisminic divergence had by the 2000s created two markedly different systems of judicial review of administrative action. Since then, however, […] Read more

Here is a long post on the relevance of administrative law values (see my articles, here and here) to the difficult issue of jurisdictional error in English administrative law. Comments welcome! A useful starting point for a discussion of jurisdictional error is the following proposition: “any grant of jurisdiction will necessarily include limits to the […] Read more

Here is the first of several extracts from a paper I am working on, on the subject of convergence and divergence in English and Canadian administrative law At first glance, administrative law in Canada, where courts regularly defer to administrative decision-makers’ interpretations of law and judicial review of administrative action is organised around the concept […] Read more

With my colleagues Professor Kenneth Armstrong, Professor John Bell and Professor Mark Elliott, I have produced  a Brexit briefing paper on ‘Implementing Transition’. Following the Prime Minister’s speech in Florence on 22 September 2017, there is growing, albeit not universal, political consensus around the notion of a transitional – or ‘implementation’ – period. The intention […] Read more