Law Commission – Public Law & Regulation

In R (Black) v Secretary of State for Justice, the Supreme Court was required to consider when Acts of Parliament are binding on the Crown. It found that the existing law was inconsistent and unsatisfactory. It then made things worse.

The UK Supreme Court’s year in 2017 was framed by two constitutional cases rooted in the medieval history of the British monarchy.

At the beginning of the year, in R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the EU, the court was concerned with what remains, in the early Twenty-First Century, of the scope of the royal prerogative. And at the year’s end, in R (Black) v Secretary of State for Justice, it had to consider the circumstances in which a contemporary Act of Parliament is binding on the Crown.

The first of these cases, which was related to the legal mechanism for delivering Brexit, achieved wide publicity. The second did not. But the judgment in Black is revealing as to the state of the UK constitution as it enters 2018, and of practical application in a wide range of cases. It tells us something about why the Crown still matters in UK law.

Continue reading Why the Crown (sometimes) still matters

The award of damages is not a remedy traditionally available in judicial review. In public law proceedings, the purpose of a claim is to identify unlawfulness and bring it to an end, not to compensate those who have been affected by it.

In recent years, however, the non-financial purity of judicial review has been eroded by a number of developments. In particular, monetary compensation is now available in some cases where the source of the wrong was non-compliance with either EU law (Francovich damages) or the European Convention on Human Rights (under section 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998).

But does the Administrative Court, without any real track record in this area, have the competence to carry out an assessment of damages in a complex case?

Continue reading Damages and the Competence of the Administrative Court