In all areas of law reasonableness tends to play a fundamental role including reasonably foreseeability, the reasonable man, beyond reasonable doubt and reasonable force to name a few. The concept of reasonableness in public decision making is no different and has developed, expanded and retracted in various jurisdictions over the past century. In public decision making, reasonableness particularly relates to judicial review, and the actions, events or otherwise which lead a public body to arrive at a particular decision rather the decision itself. It is of great importance that reasonableness is applied to public bodies in order to control the exercise of power and to prevent arbitrary and unfair decisions. In this essay, we will examine …show more content…
This became known as Wednesbury unreasonableness. It was also held that the court will not intervene simply because it disagrees with a decision made by a public body, it must keep it mind that the body has the discretion, in many cases, and a court must not substitute itself for the authority in question. The test in Wednesbury led to an increasingly larger volume of people with grievances against public bodies. Lord Diplock, in the GCHQ case , put an end to this by narrowing the Wednesbury test. He redefined Wednesbury reasonableness to ‘Wednesbury irrationality’ and stated;
‘it applies to a decision so outrageous in its defiance of logic or of accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question to be decided could have arrived at it.’
Irish approach to
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Here a compensation tribunal was set up to compensate the families of victims who had died in the Stardust tragedy. The grieving father of one victim sought a review of a decision made by the tribunal to award the mother of a victim compensation and the father no compensation. The court refused to quash the decision of the tribunal and, strangely, agreed that there were circumstances which justified awarding of compensation to one parent and not the other. This decision was made by a court which was quite critical of the approach taken by Lord Diplock in GCHQ. Henchy J. said he would be ‘slow to test reasonableness by seeing if it accords with logic’ and would be ‘equally slow’ to accept the moral standard criteria believing it a vague and inconsistent principle to base reasonableness on. Henchy J. stated the test of reasonableness as ‘whether the impugned decision plainly and unambiguously flies in the face of fundamental reason and common sense . Despite Henchy J. being critical of GCHQ, his test has been applied strictly in Ireland on policy grounds . In Stroker , a garda was dismissed following a sworn inquiry for bringing An Gardaí Síochana into disrepute. The applicant claimed his dismissal was unreasonable in relation to the alleged offenses. The court held that the decision of the commissioner to dismiss did not fly in the face of
(Boylan and Foley, p. 8). This meant that England imposed their policies without understanding the Irish economy. Ireland had to be governed by “‘Irish ideas’” (Boylan and Foley, p. viii)). Their “idea” was laissez faire.
On the 14th of October 2011, Mr Rayney had submitted an application for a trial which only involved a judge without a jury present. This was due Mr. Rayney assuming that a strong bias had been manifested pre-trial as a result of the subjective publicity revolving around the death of his wife, Corryn(The Conversation, 2012). Therefore, the jury and any member of the public would already have preconceived views in favour of Mr Rayney being guilty of murdering his wife. The trial was successful for Mr Rayney where he was acquitted of murdering his wife. Similarly, this issue is somewhat common as it had also occurred in the case Evans v The State of Western Australia [2011] WASCA 182, in which both appellants had made appeals after being convicted for murder.
All things considered, Mark Sutherland has brought together a provocative corps of respected scholars and legal thinkers who collectively offer an incisive critique of a judiciary gone awry while they offer constructive solutions for reform. They make it abundantly clear that we the American people do not have to be slaves to the edicts of these black-robed deities. Their adroit assessment of the federal judiciary is intelligent, rooted in a principled esteem for the rule of law and constitutional popular rule, and their solutions are constitutional defensible, practical and tenable. One thing is resoundingly clear, we must stand up to these demigods in block robes that contravene the design of our federal republic and offer outlandish decisions at odds with the will of the vast majority of the people. It is paramount that the American people awaken and voice their discontent to their elected representatives in Congress if we are to abate judicial tyranny.
The inquiry focused on the case being an issue of racism within the Justice System due to an unconventional fact of systemic racism, which is a society structured a certain way that then causes the system to treat minorities different than they treat the majority. There were many different points through Donald Marshall Jr.’s journey with the Supreme Court that led the inquiry to view the conviction was the cause of racism and simply not just a wrongful conviction, main reason being that there was no substantial evidence that could have placed Seale’s death in Marshall’s hands. Also that Donald Marshall Jr. was a Mi’kmaq Native man who was “worth” less in the community than the majority race (white). The main reason that the Inquiry was
Justice within the context of today’s round can be seen as exclusively retributive as we are discussing a just response towards a transgression of American law. The central question of the resolution is whether a just society ought to implement jury nullification as a legitimate check towards the exercise of governmental power thus
In 1998, a peace treaty was signed with Ireland giving up its claims to Northern Ireland. Most people in Ireland belong to the Roman Catholic Church and the extended family is a very important concept. Ireland’s major exports include machinery and equipment, computers, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and live
The Mental Capacity Act applies in England and Wales to everyone who works in health and social care and is involved in the care of a person who is over 16 years of age who may lack capacity to make a specific decision at a specific time. Core principles Core principles: • A person is assumed to have capacity. A lack of capacity has to be clearly demonstrated. • No one should be treated as unable to make a decision unless all practicable and reasonable steps to help him or her have been exhausted and shown not to work.
Robert Isenhour Federal Government 110 10/10/17 Judicial Review Judicial Review had been obsolete until 1803 when the need for it arose in the case of Marbury vs. Madison, where it was then found to become a new component to the Judicial Branch. I am here to discuss why judicial review is and shall remain a doctrine commonly used in constitutional law. Judicial Review is the power for courts to review other government branches to determine the validity of its actions whether it be constitutional or unconstitutional. These ‘acts’ can be described as legislation passed by congress, presidential orders and actions, or all state and local governmental actions.
In order to achieve this type of governing system, the opinions of the people need to be heard. The first amendment does not go too far in protecting citizens’
If so, a prima facie duty of care arose. The first stage of the test in the case of Anns v Merton LBC [1978] AC 728 incorporates the neighbour principle by Lord Atkin. Then, secondly, it was necessary to consider whether there were any considerations that ought to “negative, or to reduce or limit” that duty. The second stage of the test predicts ‘policy’ factors that negating, reducing or limiting a duty, which but for those policy reasons would be
342). This claims that sometimes laws take the shape of fallacies to stop a strong and pure opinion to be developed. The only purpose where power can be practiced to suspend a criteria is when the former represents harm to others and authority is needed to stop the abuse of “liberty” as is shown in the essay On Liberty (White, 2000, p. 342). However, there is a need to clarify that authority has no right to stop an opinion simply it does not benefit the tyranny of the majority and in this case pacifist demonstrations are needed. This is because refusing to hear an opinion that we don’t agree with is proclaiming that our opinion is absolute and there is not such a thing as an absolute truth because what is true for one person might not be true for another and no opinion has more value than other.
One of the reasons being that, in many cases the command of the public force is entrusted with judges, and to enforce its decisions, the whole power of the state would be used. No one wants to come up against something so much more powerful than him or her. The article also assures us that in every system there is a rational explanation for the outcome. A cause and effect relation binds everything.
[5] Common law works in a different way, the judges rather than the Parliament make common law or ‘judge-made law’. Considering criminal and civil cases, the judges take decisions based on the stare decisis principle (Latin “to stand by things decided”, the legal principle of determining points in litigation according to precedent [4]), deliver rulings and create precedents, thus applying the law to real life situations. Therefore, the value of the precedent is very high in the English Common Law system. The strengths of common law
After the passage of the Act there is a lack of agreement regarding the role of judges and their relationship with other organs of government. Both factors are very crucial to determine how much and what kind of judicial independence is required. As common in other constitutional and legislative provisions, the CRA provides no definition of the judicial independence. Section 1 , which seeks to protect judges from the political interference or any other kind of interference in decision making, implies that this protection attaches primarily to the judge hearing a
In the article entitled ‘Determining the Ratio Decidendi of the Case’ by Arthur L. Goodhart, I underwent a roller coaster-like journey on exploring the science behind the nature of a precedent in English law. Goodhart started with the attempt to explain the full meaning of ratio decidendi in the simplest terms. He referred to Sir John Salmond’s definition in which I have interpreted ratio decidendi as the principle of law that is found in a court decision and possesses the authority to be binding. Ratio decidendi should be distinguished from a judicial decision, as the latter is a wider concept and contains the ratio decidendi, whereas the former is a principle that carries the force of law. In another reference, Professor John Chipman Gray