Air pollution has become an international concern. The World Health Organization (WHO) claimed in 2016 that air pollution represents the biggest environmental risk to health. For 2012 the WHO assessed that one out of every nine deaths was the result of air pollution-related conditions. Air pollution affects all regions. However, the problem differs in various […]

There is abundant theoretical and doctrinal literature appraising the parameters of the decision-making strategies employed by courts in judicial review cases. Much of this literature assesses normative features of the judicial role, but in doing so there tends to be a relative deficit of core evidence on how the judiciary actually exercises their discretion in […]

It is October 2018 and Northern Ireland has been without a government for almost 2 years. In that time, the Northern Ireland judiciary has effectively muzzled the legally-dubious ability of Northern Ireland civil servants to govern by proxy. The response of the UK Government, through Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley MP, has been to draft […]

  This post contains a roundup of recent developments (in and out of courts) and recent scholarship in the area of administrative law around the common law world. To submit content for our next update, please email us at alawblogorg@gmail.com. Judicial Developments in Administrative Law Australia: The Supreme Court of New South Wales dismissed an application […]

Presidential pardons are back in vogue in the United States. First, it was President Donald Trump’s pardon of the Arizona Sheriff convicted of contempt of court, which Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe and others argued was unconstitutional. Then it was Kim Kardashian’s success in securing a pardon for a non-violent first time drug offender. Finally, there […]

In line with other common law jurisdictions, Hong Kong has adopted “proportionality” as a key test for assessing the legality of measures imposed and decisions made by public authorities in judicial review cases. Proportionality now sits firmly alongside the traditional Wednesbury reasonableness test [1948] 1 KB 223 in this respect. The two tests, however, typically […]

The recent post by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule raises the intriguing question of whether there is and, if so, what is the internal moral content of the administrative law principles crafted by the courts. This post considers whether we can take this enquiry further: do the activities of the administrative state have an internal […]