The Supreme Court of the United States decision in Perez v. Mortgage Bankers’ Association, 575 U.S. _____ (2015) (discussed here) is also notable for the concurring opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas, which take aim at Seminole Rock deference. Pursuant to this concept, an administrative agency’s interpretation of its own regulations controls unless it is […] Read more

Reasonableness is fast becoming the dominant organizing principle of Canadian administrative law. In particular, Courts of Appeal around the country have been putting flesh on the bones of the skeletal definition given in Dunsmuir (see, e.g. here). The latest example is Delios v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 FCA 117, a straightforward review of a labour […] Read more

I have been busily marking exam scripts for the last couple of weeks, which in part explains the recent slowdown in blogging activity. I thought it would be fun to post my administrative law exam. It’s in French, followed — just for fun — by a Google Translate version: Lors du printemps 2015, les activités […] Read more

I am happy to be able to post a link to an almost-final version of my chapter for Mark Elliott and Hanna Wilberg’s forthcoming collection, The Scope and Intensity of Substantive Review: Traversing Taggart’s Rainbow, to be published next month by Hart Publishing. Here is the abstract: In the common law tradition, courts are at […] Read more

This year’s common law conference at the University of Montreal is on the law of charitable trusts. As usual, there is a wide range of guests from all over the common law world on topics of interest to public and private lawyers. Register here. Here is the programme: 8.30 – 9.00 Keynote Address Judge Alison […] Read more

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law” (“The Path of the Law” (1897), 10 Harvard Law Review 457, at p. 461). He adopted the perspective of the “bad man”, someone “who cares only for the material […] Read more

Modern examples of successful exclusion of the rules of procedural fairness are relatively rare. An interesting recent example is  CPCF v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, [2015] HCA 1, a typically lengthy and thorough decision of the High Court of Australia. There are very useful summaries available on the University of Melbourne’s Opinions on […] Read more

Mark Elliott has a typically excellent post on the UK Supreme Court’s decision in the Pham case (my post). Proportionality now seems destined to emerge as a common-law ground of review in the UK, in at least some circumstances, a development partly justified on the family resemblance between reasonableness and proportionality. Mark writes: Pham is […] Read more

David Mullan’s comment on yesterday’s post prompts me to give (virtual) voice to a thought about the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay (City), 2015 SCC 16. Gascon J. reviewed the question of the scope of the state’s duty of religious neutrality on a standard of correctness — allowing him […] Read more

My administrative law students will sit their final exam on Friday. So some of them having been coming to see me with questions about the finer points of Canadian administrative law doctrine. Often, my answer is: “Je ne sais pas”. And, unfortunately, the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay (City), […] Read more