Public Law for Everyone
Professor Mark Elliott
In my first post on the Supreme Court’s recent judgment in In the matter of an application by Geraldine Finucane for Judicial Review [2019] UKSC 7, I considered the Court’s approach to the relevance (or otherwise) of reliance in legitimate expectation cases, and looked at the way in which the case highlights the less than straightforward nature of the distinction […]
This is the first of two posts on the Supreme Court’s recent judgment in In the matter of an application by Geraldine Finucane for Judicial Review [2019] UKSC 7. The second post can be found here. Legitimate expectation has long occupied an uncertain place within the broader doctrinal landscape of English administrative law. It sits, uncomfortably, at a number of […]
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.
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.
Written by Mark Elliott and Robert Thomas, Public Law is the UK’s best-selling textbook in the field. The following post is based on the preface to the third edition, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.
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 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 — laid down by Lord […]
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.
The next W G Hart Workshop is being convened by two of my Cambridge colleagues, Professor Peter Cane and Dr Hayley Hooper, and Professor Jeff King of UCL. The title of the 2017 Workshop is “Law, Society and Administration in a Changing World”. The call for papers issued by Professor Cane, Dr Hooper and Professor King is reproduced below.
The second in the biennial series of Public Law Conferences will be held in Cambridge from 12 to 14 September 2016 in the Faculty of Law in Cambridge. Convened by […]
The Judicial Power Project has published a list of 50 “problematic” cases. It makes for interesting reading. The aim of the Judicial Power Project is to address the “problem” of […]
