Has the Supreme Court of Canada encouraged lower courts to employ correctness review of certain legal questions? Its recent decisions in Tervita Corp. v. Canada (Commissioner of Competition), 2015 SCC 3 and Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay (City), 2015 SCC 16, both cases where the Court decided correctness review would be appropriate (see my posts […] Read more

In this excellent study of how judges have implemented bills of rights in three common law jurisdictions (Canada, the UK and South Africa), Robert Leckey carefully dismantles many of the wilder claims about judicial review of legislative action. Replacing the cry of “judicial activism” with the more muted “judicial agency”, he identifies remedial discretion as […] Read more

I have a new paper on SSRN, a draft of a chapter that will appear in a forthcoming collection edited by Greg Weeks and Matthew Groves, Legitimate Expectations in the Common Law World (Hart, 2016). Here is the abstract: Critics doubt the existence of any coherent doctrine of legitimate expectations in the common law. Legitimate […] Read more

(This is the fourth in a series of posts. Read the first, second and third. The draft can be downloaded in its entirety here.) Language can be useful in reminding judges of the limits of the judicial role. As any student of administrative law comes quickly to understand, where a power has been assigned by […] Read more

I attended the excellent inaugural Public Law Conference in 2014 at the University of Cambridge. The second in the series has now been announced. It will be held from September 12 to 14 (Monday to Wednesday), 2016, again at the University of Cambridge. Here is the call for papers: The theme for the 2016 Conference […] Read more

I am a little late to Trinity Western University v The Law Society of Upper Canada, 2015 ONSC 4250, the second in what is likely to become a lengthy string of judicial decisions on whether TWU’s law school should be accredited by Canada’s law societies. The first decision, favourable to TWU, came from Nova Scotia […] Read more

Where I come from we sometimes joke that rugby is a game played by gentlemen with odd-shaped balls. The same is true of the human demolition derby — American football — so popular in my current location. And even those of us who tune in to the Superbowl only for the ads know that star […] Read more

(This is the third in a series of posts. Read the first and second. The draft can be downloaded in its entirety here.) Sometimes, in order to take the necessary much closer look, it is necessary to carefully peel off the labels applied to particular ‘forms’ of administrative decision-making. These labels are conclusory, functioning as […] Read more

Now that all the fuss about his past life as a blogger has died down, it is safe to venture a few comments about Justice Russell Brown’s appointment to the Supreme Court. He replaces Rothstein J., who retires today, leaving a very large gap in the Court’s administrative law and economic regulation expertise. Brown J. […] Read more

(For the first post in this series, see here). The draft can be downloaded in its entirety here. Perhaps the most attractive – though also the most facile – endeavour for those who think deeply about administrative law is to formulate a general principle that unifies disparate strands of case-law. This then functions as a […] Read more