In his judgment in Meadows v. Minister for Justice, [2010] IESC 3, Murray C.J. suggested that a general right to reasons for administrative decisions should be recognized in Irish law. In its decision last week in Mallak v. Minister for Justice, [2012] IESC 59, the Irish Supreme Court did not quite go that far, but […] Read more

Kevin Stack has posted Interpreting Regulations on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The age of statutes has given way to an era of regulations, but our jurisprudence has fallen behind. Despite the centrality of regulations to law, courts have no intelligible approach to regulatory interpretation. The neglect of regulatory interpretation is not only a shortcoming […] Read more

The long title explains the result in Conseil des montagnais de Natashquan c. Malec, 2012 CF 1392, a case about alleged discrimination against Aboriginal educators.An initial decision unfavourable to the applicant was made, but quashed on judicial review. It was sent back to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal for re-decision. The President sent it back […] Read more

Term has happily come to an end up in now-icy Montréal, so I am catching up on all of the reading I missed in the last few hectic weeks. One paper I read some time ago but neglected to blog about is Privatization’s Progeny by Jon Michaels. A half-thought that occurred to me at the […] Read more

There is a very brief discussion in a recent Alberta Court of Appeals decision, Kretschmer v Terrigno, 2012 ABCA 345, of the relationship between the rule against bias and imputed conflicts of interest. The most interesting point to emerge is that the rule against bias, applied to adjudicators, may be less demanding than the rules […] Read more

News stories about an Ontario court striking down the City of Toronto’s ban on shark fin products (decision not yet available online), as well as a pending media engagement, led me to have another look at Hackland J.’s decision to remove Mayor Rob Ford from office earlier in the week.One of the aspects of the […] Read more

RM v. Scottish Ministers, [2012] UKSC 58 was a relatively straightforward case for the UK Supreme Court. The applicant/appellant is currently detained in a mental health facility under a compulsion order and wishes to apply to the Mental Health Tribunal for an order declaring that he is being held in conditions of excessive security. The […] Read more

Just a very brief note on a couple of recent first-instance decisions that caught my eye. It has been suggested (para. 22) that the Supreme Court of Canada has recently indicated a strong preference for deferential judicial review when decision-makers are interpreting their constitutive or “home” statutes. Nevertheless, the categories of jurisdictional error and general […] Read more

Plenty of cyberink has already been spilled on the removal from office yesterday of Toronto mayor, Rob Ford. Hackland J.’s decision has aroused surprise, support, calls for reform of Ontario’s Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, and, worst of all, bad sporting metaphors. While Hackland J.’s conclusions and interpretive approach are perfectly respectable, I do not […] Read more

One of the more interesting political stories in Québec at the moment involves the new environment minister, Daniel Breton and the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement. On a visit to the BAPE’s offices in October, Breton allegedly told members of the BAPE that he would telephone the chairperson whenever the BAPE made a recommendation he […] Read more