The importance of consistency in decision-making has been increasingly recognised in English administrative law. The Supreme Court’s recent judgment in Gallaher, in which consistency is said not to be a free-standing administrative law principle, is thus both surprising and questionable.
Category: Administrative Law
In a new paper, I examine the way in which judges in the UK respond to ouster clauses — and reflect on what such responses might tell us about the nature of the contemporary British constitution and the courts' perception of their place within it
In the Privacy International case, the Court of Appeal accepted that an ouster clause precluded judicial review of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Sales LJ contended that the issue turned on 'a short point of statutory construction'. The reality, however, is that such cases take the courts into the deepest of constitutional waters.
The Unison case is an important victory for workers who wish to enforce their rights in Employment Tribunals. But the Supreme Court's judgment also implicates some key principles of UK constitutional law — and raises a question about how far courts can go in upholding such principles.
In Secretary of State for Work & Pensions v Carmichael, the Government argued that the First-tier Tribunal could not intervene when housing benefit was reduced under ECHR-incompatible regulations. The Upper Tribunal disagreed. In doing so, it was on strong constitutional ground.
One of the first posts I wrote on this blog concerned the Supreme Court’s decision in Jones v First-tier Tribunal [2013] UKSC 19. At the heart of the case was the distinction between questions of law and fact, and its implications for judicial oversight of tribunals. The distinction is important because if an issue that … Continue reading Discarding the fig-leaf of analytical reasoning? The Hutton case and the law/fact distinction
The Admin Law Blog is a new multi-author blog concerning administrative law in the common law world. I am pleased, at the request of the editors, to cross-post the following piece, in which they announce the launch of their site and set out their vision for it.
In Oakley v South Cambridgeshire District Council [2017] EWCA Civ 71, a Court of Appeal with strong public law credentials — consisting of Elias, Patten and Sales LJJ — addressed the scope of the common law duty to give reasons. In this area, the orthodox position has long been understood to consist in the principle … Continue reading Oakley v South Cambridgeshire District Council: The maturing of the common law duty to give reasons
Ouster clauses raise difficult questions about the relationship between the constitutional principles of the rule of law and the sovereignty of Parliament — as the disagreement between the two judges in this case demonstrates
The fifth edition of Administrative Law has been published by Oxford University Press. The new edition is co-written by Mark Elliott, Professor of Public Law at the University of Cambridge, and Jason NE Varuhas, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne. The following blogpost is based on the authors’ preface to the fifth edition.
Public Law for Everyone 