Constitutional and Administrative Law
This subject covers the architecture of the state: parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the grounds on which the courts will review executive decisions.
The examiners favour scenario questions that test whether a public body has acted lawfully, applying the three classic grounds of judicial review to a short fact pattern.
- Parliamentary sovereignty and its limits
- The rule of law and the separation of powers
- Grounds for judicial review: illegality, irrationality, procedural impropriety
- The royal prerogative and its reviewability
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Written for this page only, in the same single best answer format as the 270+ questions in the Constitutional and Administrative Law section of the course.
A licensing authority refuses a taxi licence under a policy that automatically refuses any applicant with any past conviction, regardless of its nature or age, without considering the applicant’s individual circumstances. Which ground of judicial review does this raise?
A public body may adopt a general policy for consistency, but unlawfully fetters its discretion, a form of illegality, if it applies that policy as a rigid rule and refuses to consider whether a case should be treated as an exception. Irrationality concerns a decision so unreasonable that no sensible authority could reach it on its merits, not the mere existence of a policy. Procedural impropriety concerns fairness of process, not the substance of the policy, and proportionality is not treated as a free-standing ground in an ordinary domestic judicial review claim of this kind.
Authority: British Oxygen Co Ltd v Minister of Technology [1971] AC 610 (unlawful fettering of discretion).
Where Constitutional and Administrative Law connects
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