Commentary on developments in administrative law, particularly judicial review of administrative action by common law courts.
Canadian courts have come to accept that the constitution is not some sort of holy grail that administrative decision-makers should not touch. As it is the supreme law of the land, its writ ought to run in any government agency, and its authority may be invoked by individuals in almost any decision-making setting. But does […] Read more
The Supreme Court of the United States released Scialabba v. Cuellar de Osorio this week, an attempt to pick apart the entrails of a poorly drafted immigration provision designed to deal with the problem of “aging out”. What happens when an immigrant has been on a waiting list for so long that he becomes too […] Read more
Purely coincidentally, the day after Quebec passed its “right to die” legislation, the Supreme Court of Canada released an important decision on prosecutorial discretion: R. v. Anderson, 2014 SCC 41. The two are linked. (This is a quick take, and I will update with further links later today. UPDATE: updated!) Quebec’s legislative initiative is problematic […] Read more
When judges strike down administrative decisions, they take a step that must be justifiable and justified in normative terms. I suppose we all agree on that. Yet whole swathes of administrative law doctrine do not establish normative standards for judicial intervention. Rather, they rely on descriptive labels.The rule against bias is an excellent example. A […] Read more
A major collection on substantive judicial review of administrative action will appear shortly under Hart Publishing’s imprint. Edited by Mark Elliott and Hanna Wilberg, The Scope and Intensity of Substantive Review: Traversing Taggart’s Rainbow brings together many of the world’s leading public law scholars in a collection that follows in the sizeable footsteps of The […] Read more
Wednesday’s symposium on the Nadon Reference was a great success. CPAC‘s cameras captured the event so it will be available online at some point if you weren’t able to make it in person. I presented my Legal Academia 2.0 thinkpiece. It went down well, though as I accept, the idea is emergent rather than dominant. […] Read more
On Friday, the Globe and Mail dropped a large bombshell by revealing that four of the six judges proposed by the federal government to fill Justice Fish’s seat on the Supreme Court of Canada came from the federal courts. Regular readers will of course know that in Reference re Supreme Court Act, ss. 5 and […] Read more
There is a piece in the latest print issue of Maclean’s magazine (sub only) on a very interesting Federal Court case from earlier this month: Muhammad v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2014 FC 448. M’s details were posted on what I have dubbed “Canada’s Least Wanted“, the Canadian Border Services Agency’s ‘wanted‘ list of immigration […] Read more
My suggestion to headline writers is made with tongue firmly in cheek, of course. Often in public law cases, the federal government is a “winner” or “loser” only in the limited sense that a position it took as an institution was vindicated or not. That the identity of the cabinet members tends to be largely […] Read more
A quick note on McCormick v. Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, 2014 SCC 39, an interesting case about whether law firm partners can be required to retire at 65. Short answer: yes (in British Columbia). The BC Human Rights Tribunal found that Mr. McCormick was an employee of the firm, a finding which would have entitled […] Read more