Earlier this summer, the British Labour Party ended up in court over an attempt to restrict the electorate for a leadership contest (won, last weekend, by Jeremy Corbyn). At issue in Evangelou and others v. McNichol, [2016] EWCA Civ 816 was whether the Party’s National Executive Committee could provide that only those who had been members of the […] Read more

I have been in the United Kingdom for almost a month now. Brexit, unsurprisingly, dominates the political landscape and I expect I will be returning to it more than once in the coming months and years. This is just a brief post to highlight the scale of the challenges for the United Kingdom of implementing Brexit, […] Read more

Paul Craig’s essay on Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (discussed previously here) is an excellent survey of the historical foundations of English administrative law, which casts serious doubt on Hamburger’s account. Entitled “The Legitimacy of US Administrative Law and the Foundations of English Administrative Law: Setting the Historical Record Straight“, it is available on SSRN: Administrative […] Read more

Although I have not been blogging much for various reasons (hampered most recently by the sad demise of my HP Probook), I have been writing. My new paper on the distinctiveness of the Crown in judicial review of administrative action will be published in the Review of Constitutional Studies shortly. Here is the abstract for “Royal Treatment: […] Read more

In the concluding chapters of Public Law Adjudication in Common Law Systems: Process and Substance — the edited collection arising from the first Public Law Conference, held at the University of Cambridge in 2014 — both Professor David Feldman and Professor Cheryl Saunders gently suggested that my chapter, “Administrative Law: A Values-Based Approach“, was produced from a Canadian perspective. […] Read more

At the second Public Law Conference the week after next, I will be presenting a paper entitled “Administrative Law: Characteristics, Legitimacy, Unity“. Here is the abstract: Over the last half century, courts around the common law world have transformed the principles of judicial review of administrative action. Administrative law’s scope and depth have increased dramatically. […] Read more

I have a new paper on Canadian administrative law, to be published shortly in the McGill Law Journal, entitled “Struggling Towards Coherence in Canadian Administrative Law? Recent Cases on Standard of Review and Reasonableness“. It is likely to be topical, in view of recent developments: the discussion in Wilson and the extra-judicial plea by Justice David Stratas for “doctrinal coherence […] Read more

I wrote this op-ed-style piece earlier in the week with my initial reactions to the announcement of a new appointment process but was travelling and did not have an opportunity to post it. If I find the time over the weekend, I’ll add some thoughts about the constitutionality of the new process, in particular the […] Read more

As is well known, the people of Britain voted to leave the European Union on June 23. Quite how that vote will shape Britain’s future relationship with the EU remains unpredictable. One important factor is whether and when Article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union will be triggered. There has been a flood […] Read more

There are several points of general interest raised by the Supreme Court of Canada’s most recent administrative law decision, Wilson v. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., 2016 SCC 29. By majority, the Court reversed the Federal Court of Appeal (see my post). For a discussion of the merits — in which the Court restored what labour […] Read more