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

The Working Group on EU Administrative Law of Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs recently reported on the desirability of an EU-wide code of administrative procedure along the lines of America’s Administrative Procedure Act (or Ontario’s Statutory Powers Procedure Act).Interestingly, the Committee accepts that ‘soft law’ — internal policy, expressed in a variety of non-binding forms […] Read more

The Supreme Court of the United States recently cast a critical eye over the concept of Auer deference (so called even though the seminal case is actually Bowles v. Seminole Rock & Sand Co.). When administrative bodies promulgate rules, regulations and policies to fill in the gaps in statutory provisions, their promulgations may themselves have […] Read more