scholarly journals The Scope and Meaning of Reasonableness Review

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Daly

This article draws attention to the post-Dunsmuir framework regarding the standard of review of administrative action and the Supreme Court of Canada’s reluctance to engage in grand theorizing about the general principles of judicial review. The article explores the uncertainty surrounding the application of the standard of reasonableness and what factors can or should be taken into consideration during its application. The article identifies four key problems — the scope of the post-Dunsmuir framework, the scope of its correctness category, the difficult relationship between the reasons given for a decision and the substantive reasonableness of the decision in question, and the emergence of difficult distinctions bedevilling the application of the reasonableness standard. Through identifying weaknesses in the current administration of reasonableness review, it is hoped that the courts, sooner rather than later, will adopt a unified approach for using the reasonableness standard of review.

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark P Mancini

In an upcoming set of cases, the Supreme Court of Canada will review its approach to the standard of review of administrative action. In this paper, the author suggests that the Court must go back to the foundation of judicial review in redesigning the standard of review, namely, the task of courts to police the legal boundaries of the administrative body. To do so, courts must authentically interpret the legislative grant of authority to the administrative decision-maker, particularly to determine the appropriate intensity of review. To that end, the author suggests that the Court should discard two myths that have pervaded modern administrative law: (1) that administrative decisionmakers should be granted deference based on purported expertise in matters of statutory interpretation; and (2) that jurisdictional questions exist separately from questions of law. The myths may impose a different standard of review than the one discernible with the ordinary tools of statutory interpretation. The author argues that these court-created devices should not exist at the expense of the constitutionally prescribed duty of the courts to exercise their policing function and engage in genuine statutory interpretation to determine the appropriate standard of judicial review in a given case.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moeen Cheema ◽  
David Dyzenhaus ◽  
Thomas Poole

Over the last decade, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has emerged as a powerful and overtly political institution. While the strong form of judicial review adopted by the Supreme Court has fostered the perception of a sudden and ahistorical judicialisation of politics, the judiciary's prominent role in adjudicating issues of governance and statecraft was long in the making. This book presents a deeply contextualised account of law in Pakistan and situates the judicial review jurisprudence of the superior courts in the context of historical developments in constitutional politics, evolution of state structures and broader social transformations. This book highlights that the bedrock of judicial review has remained in administrative law; it is through the consistent development of the 'Writ jurisdiction' and the judicial review of administrative action that Pakistan's superior courts have progressively carved an expansive institutional role and aggrandised themselves to the status of the regulator of the state.


2005 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-642
Author(s):  
Bernard Amyot

The object of this article considers the ever-evolving concept of jurisdiction in the context of judicial review of administrative action. The author examines recent jurisprudential developments from an historical perspective in an attempt to reveal those factors triggering intervention. The Supreme Court of Canada has often fashioned its tests of jurisdiction to fit the intended results. Hence, over the last decades, jurisdictional terminology has become ripe with deceptive distinctions and attempts to rationalize the various tests have in fact raised most perplexing problems.


1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Gavison

A discussion of the role of courts in Israel today demands some introductory remarks. The Supreme Court and the President of the Supreme Court enjoy great acclaim and respect within Israel and abroad, but have recently come under attack from a variety of sources. These attacks are often confused, and many of them are clearly motivated by narrow partisan interests and an inherent objection to the rule of law and judicial review. But these motives do not necessarily weaken the dangers which the attacks pose to the legitimacy of the courts in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, in Israel's public life. The fact that in some sectors extremely harsh criticism of the court is seen to be an electoral boost, testifies to the serious and dangerous nature of the threat. This situation creates a dilemma for those who want a strong and independent judiciary, believing it is essential for freedom and democracy, but who also believe that, during the last two decades, the courts have transgressed limits they should respect. The dilemma becomes especially acute when the political echo sounds out in one's criticism, and when one is part of the group that believes that the legal and the judicial systems have made some contribution to the prevalence of these hyperbolic and dangerous attacks, as I am.


2007 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
THOMAS M. KECK

This paper explores three competing accounts of judicial review by comparing the enacting and invalidating coalitions for each of the fifty-three federal statutes struck down by the Supreme Court during its 1981 through 2005 terms. When a Republican judicial coalition invalidates a Democratic statute, the Court's decision is consistent with a partisan account, and when a conservative judicial coalition invalidates a liberal statute, the decision is explicable on policy grounds. But when an ideologically mixed coalition invalidates a bipartisan statute, the decision may have reflected an institutional divide between judges and legislators rather than a partisan or policy conflict. Finding more cases consistent with this last explanation than either of the others, I suggest that the existing literature has paid insufficient attention to the possibility of institutionally motivated judicial behavior, and more importantly, that any comprehensive account of the Court's decisions will have to attend to the interaction of multiple competing influences on the justices.


Author(s):  
Kenneth Hamer

The Supreme Court held that the doctrine of cause of action estoppel applied to successive complaints before a professional disciplinary body, that disciplinary proceedings were civil in nature and that therefore the principles of res judicata applied, and that there was no reason why cause of action estoppel should not apply to successive sets of proceedings before the Disciplinary Committee of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). The Supreme Court so held in allowing an appeal by C-W, a chartered accountant, against the Court of Appeal, which had upheld the dismissal of his application for judicial review of the decision by the Committee to refuse to dismiss a second complaint based on the same facts of a first complaint that had been dismissed on the merits.


Author(s):  
Yseult Marique

Analysing the administrative case law of the Belgian Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910, this chapter shows that the Supreme Court applied the main features of a positivist legal thought (based on the assumption of clarity, coherence, and completeness of the formal law) to administrative action and its legality. It equipped the central and local institutions of the State with functioning powers, allowing an operational state to develop despite social unrest. As the social and technological context changed at the end of the nineteenth century, the statute book became more confused, however. This gave the Supreme Court ample room to interpret the law creatively and pragmatically. The ‘administrative miracle’ in Belgium is that the Supreme Court did not shackle social forces and unbridle the administration so much that the very course it wanted to avert actually happened. This may be down to the creative judicial genius that the Belgian judiciary developed a formal approach whilst deciding pragmatically on the substance of cases.


2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 811-833 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy B. Flemming ◽  
Glen S. Krutz

The expanding public policy role of high courts heightens concerns over whether societal and political inequalities affect the outcomes of litigation. However, comparative research on this question is limited. This article assesses whether status inequalities between parties and differences in the experience and resources of attorneys influence the selection of cases for judicial review in the Supreme Court of Canada. A series of statistical models reveal that governments are more likely than other parties to influence whether leave is granted but that the experience and resources of lawyers, unlike in the United States, have little impact. The decentralized, low volume and high access features of the Canadian process may explain this finding.


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