This is the second post excerpting from my paper on stare decisis in Canadian administrative law for the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice’s 2015 National Roundtable on Administrative Law (Moncton, Friday, May 22): Consistency in Tribunal Decision-Making. You can read the first post here. —– Canadian courts have recently embraced the view that, sometimes, […] Read more

I will be speaking next Friday at the 2015 National Roundtable on Administrative Law organized by the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice. This year’s topic is Consistency in Tribunal Decision-Making and I will be kicking the day off with some thoughts on stare decisis. Here are Sections I and II of my draft […] Read more

My paper on Administrative Law Values is now available in revised (much shorter!) form on SSRN: download it here. Abstract: I focus in this essay on judicial review of administrative action, looking at the subject “from the inside, trying to make sense of lawyers’ reasons and arguments as they are actually presented and defended”.  Rather […] Read more

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