Tag: legitimate expectations
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Jonathan Collinson: From Learning to Lawyering: When Can Political Accountability Have Legal Consequences?
The responsibility for holding the government to account for its failings is the core constitutional role of a range of ‘watchdog’ bodies outside of Parliament, such as inspectorates, commissioners, public inquiries, independent reviews, and ombudsmen. Accountability is seen as a tool to make and keep governments, agencies and individual officials effective in delivering on their…
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Gabriel Tan: R (Al-Haq) v Business and Trade Secretary: A Death Knell for Common Law Domestic Footholds for Unincorporated Treaties?
In September 2024, the Business and Trade Secretary (‘the Secretary of State’)suspended licences authorising the export of items that might be used in carrying out or facilitating Israeli military operations in the Gaza conflict. However, the Secretary of State carved out from that suspension licences for the export of components for F-35 aircraft which could…
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Dane Luo: Security, the Sussexes and Sir Geoffrey’s Judgments on the Duty to Follow Policies
Public authorities are imbued with statutory and prerogative powers. And every now and then, they publish a policy setting out how they will exercise those powers. Policies must not be so rigid that they amount to a fetter on the discretion of decision-makers. But provided there is ample flexibility so as not to fetter, then…
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Hanna Wilberg: A Duty of Consistency? The Missing Distinction Between Its Two Forms
In R (Gallaher Group Ltd) v Competition and Markets Authority the Supreme Court ruled that UK domestic law “does not recognise equal treatment as a distinct principle of administrative law. Consistency … is a ‘generally desirable’ objective, but not an absolute rule.” (para 24). It took the view that issues of consistency generally arise as…
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Joe Tomlinson: The Problem with the Trust Conception of the Doctrine of Legitimate Expectations in Administrative Law
Since the emergence of the modern doctrine of legitimate expectation in English and Welsh administrative law in the 1969 case of Schmidt v Secretary of State for Home Affairs [1968] 3 All E.R. 795, the doctrine has been, and continues to be, on the sharp end of some academic and (less occasionally) judicial barbs. From…
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Virginia Mantouvalou: EU Citizens as Bargaining Chips
A few days after the referendum on EU membership of the European Union, Theresa May stated that she would not guarantee the rights of EU citizens in the UK. Her statements were supported by Philip Hammond, then the Foreign Secretary, who said that it would be ‘unwise’ or ‘absurd’ to guarantee rights of EU citizens…
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Adam Perry and Farrah Ahmed: Constitutional Conventions and Legitimate Expectations
Courts and commentators have sometimes said the administrative law doctrine of legitimate expectations is incoherent. They say that the various ways of acquiring a legitimate expectation do not hang together; nothing unifies them. For example, Lord Brown in Paponette v Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago agreed with a commentator’s description of the doctrine of legitimate expectations…
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Leah Grolman and Greg Weeks: Guidelines and Assisted Suicide: an Australian Perspective
The morally and politically charged area of assisted suicide has many of the hallmarks of an insoluble problem. This has not prevented courts in some jurisdictions considering how they might ‘legalise’ assisted suicide without really legalising it. In doing so, they have raised manifold challenges in the minds of administrative and constitutional lawyers, including, in…
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Greg Weeks: Can you stop the Revenue from acting on a change of mind?
A recent judgment in an interlocutory hearing in the Federal Court of Australia has raised the fascinating question of what redress might be available against a revenue authority for changing its mind. In Macquarie Bank Limited v Commissioner of Taxation, the applicant sought to restrain the Commissioner of Taxation from acting on his changed view…