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

The decision of the Federal Court of Appeal in Paradis Honey Ltd. v. Canada, 2015 FCA 89 is quite remarkable. A majority of the Court developed a new test for public authority liability in tort, casting off the previous unwieldy private-law framework in favour of an approach that relies exclusively on public law concepts. The […] Read more

Shortly after a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada wrote that when fundamental rights are engaged by an administrative decision, “reasonableness requires proportionality” (here, at para. 38), the members of the UK Supreme Court said something very similar in Pham v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, [2015] UKSC 19. The case was […] Read more

What sort of a King will Prince Charles be? A clue may lie in the contents of the so-called “black spider” letters he sends to government ministers, so named because they are typed up after Prince Charles writes them out in longhand and sent after he supplements them with additional cursive script. The Upper Tribunal […] Read more

Regular readers will know that I had quite a bit to say about the gun registry case decided by the Supreme Court of Canada on Friday: Quebec (Attorney General) v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 14. I have written a brief summary and commentary on the case at the I-CONnect blog. Here is a snippet: […] Read more

Ireland now has a Court of Appeal. If some of its citizens were unaware of its existence, the buzz that followed  Bederev v. Ireland, [2015] IECA 38 put paid to any lack of public awareness. In a set of reasons by Hogan J., the Court held that s. 2(2) of the Misuse of Drugs Act […] Read more

Where an administrative decision-maker has violated a fundamental right, how should courts review the decision? Should they apply the standards of constitutional law (a proportionality test, for example)? Or should they apply the standard grounds of administrative law (such as reasonableness)? The Supreme Court of Canada has written more than most on this question and […] Read more

Regular readers know of my fascination with the “internal standard of review” problem: how does an appellate body within the administration go about reviewing first-instance decisions? The issue will shortly be before the Federal Court of Appeal, in the context of refugee appeals. I have a paper (in French) on the subject which will appear […] Read more