Category: Judiciary
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Jason Varuhas: Remedies Reform Part 2: Discretionary Factors
This is the second in a series of two posts on the remedial reforms proposed in the Judicial Review and Courts Bill (2021), which provide for courts in judicial review proceedings to grant suspended and prospective-only quashing orders. The first post considered the general case for reform, arguing reform is justified so as to reassert…
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Cassandra Somers-Joce, Daniel Hoadley, Editha Nemsic, and Joe Tomlinson: Better Evidence of Judicial Review Decision-Making: Exploring the Potential of Machine Learning
There are many claims made about decision-making in judicial review. The way that judges do decide, or ought to decide, cases is the subject of lively debate within the political, policy, practitioner, and academic spheres. For instance, in recent years there have been prominent warnings of the ‘conceptual growth or overgrowth’ of judicial review and…
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Jonathan Morgan: IRAL’s Missing Remedy: Compensation for Unlawfulness
The current blog post considers the failure of the current judicial review reform process, from IRAL onwards, to give proper consideration to compensation for unlawful government acts. This has been less discussed than the discretion over the temporal effect of quashing orders (which I considered here). It may be that the Realpolitik of this omission…
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Jonathan Morgan: In Praise of Flexibility: Clause 1 of the Judicial Review and Courts Bill (2021)
Much has been written about the government’s judicial review reform project, which has led from IRAL to a further round of government consultation, culminating in the Judicial Review and Courts Bill. This note concerns Clause 1 (‘Quashing Orders’). This provision in the Bill has received an excellent summary, commentary and thoughtful critique from Tom Hickman. …
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Aileen McHarg and Alison L. Young: The Resilience of the (Old) British Constitution
In 2009, Vernon Bogdanor wrote about The New British Constitution. His thesis was that a decade of New Labour reforms had produced a shift in the nature of the constitution, from one based on parliamentary sovereignty, to one based on the ‘sovereignty of the constitution’. Since 2009, further constitutional reforms have been implemented by governments…
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Alison L Young: Judicial Review of Policies – Clarification or Judicial Retreat?
Policies are not law. Nevertheless, they play a large role in administrative law, providing clarity as to how a public authority will exercise a discretionary power. Policies can also be relevant considerations, create legitimate expectations, or require that an individual who falls within the scope of a policy should have that policy applied to them,…
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Mark K Heatley: The Implications of the Hertfordshire County Council Case for Local Democracy
The High Court recently delivered its judgment in the case of Hertfordshire County Council v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, finding that remote meetings of local councils could not continue after 7 May 2021. This article looks at the decision and considers its impact for future local democracy. In England council…
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Mikołaj Barczentewicz: Should Cart Judicial Reviews be Abolished? Empirically Based Response
The Government adopted a recommendation of the Independent Review of Administrative Law that Cart judicial reviews should be abolished. The reasons given by the Review for that recommendation have been criticised on this blog by Joe Tomlinson & Alison Pickup and by Joanna Bell. The Review (and the Government) claimed that there is only a…
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Joanna Bell: Digging for Information about Cart JRs
Anyone who has ever tried to study judicial review in England and Wales empirically knows it is a little like digging for gold without a metal detector: it is difficult to know where to dig and there is also no guarantee that you will find what you are looking for. In a characteristically well-argued and…
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Florence Powell and Stephanie Needleman: How radical an instrument is Section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998?
The operation of the Human Rights Act 1998 (the “HRA”) is currently being reviewed by the Government’s Independent Human Rights Act Review (the “Review”). One of the Review’s key themes is “the impact of the HRA on the relationship between the judiciary, the executive and the legislature”. In respect of this theme, the Terms of…