Liberating Malawi's Administrative Justice Jurisprudence from Its Common Law Shackles

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danwood Mzikenge Chirwa

AbstractThe 1994 Malawian Constitution is unique in that it, among other things, recognizes administrative justice as a fundamental right and articulates the notion of constitutional supremacy. This right and the idea of constitutional supremacy have important implications for Malawi's administrative law, which was hitherto based on the common law inherited from Britain. This article highlights the difficulties that Malawian courts have faced in reconciling the right to administrative justice as protected under the new constitution with the common law. In doing so, it offers some insights into what the constitutionalization of administrative justice means for Malawian administrative law. It is argued that the constitution has altered the basis and grounds for judicial review so fundamentally that the Malawian legal system's marriage to the English common law can be regarded as having irretrievably broken down as far as administrative law is concerned.

Author(s):  
Timothy Endicott

Administrative Law explains the constitutional principles of the subject and their application across the range of twenty-first-century administrative law. The focus on constitutional principles is meant to bring some order to the very diverse topics with which you need to deal if you are to understand this very complex branch of public law. The common law courts, government agencies, and Parliament have developed a wide variety of techniques for controlling the enormously diverse activities of twenty-first-century government. Underlying all that variety is a set of constitutional principles. This book uses the law of judicial review to identify and to explain these principles, and then shows how they ought to be worked out in the private law of tort and contract, in the tribunals system, and in non-judicial techniques such as investigations by ombudsmen, auditors, and other government agencies. The aim is to equip the reader to take a principled approach to the controversial problems of administrative law.


Author(s):  
John Baker

This chapter is concerned with the history of mechanisms for reviewing judicial and administrative decisions. It begins with the writ of error, which was confined to errors on the face of the record of a court of record and therefore not an appeal as now understood. But informal methods were developed for reserving points to be discussed by all the judges of England, usually in the Exchequer Chamber or Serjeants’ Inn. Appeals in a wider sense began in Chancery and were not brought into the common-law system till 1875. The ‘prerogative writs’ of prohibition, habeas corpus, certiorari, and mandamus, enabled the King’s Bench to review inferior jurisdictions and also the exercise of power by officials and ministers. It is explained how this grew into the present system of administrative law. There is also a brief account of the rise of tribunals, and how their decisions came to be reviewable.


Author(s):  
Paul Daly

This book has three goals: to enhance understanding of administrative law; to guide future development of the law; and to justify the core features of the contemporary law of judicial review of administrative action. Around the common law world, the law of judicial review of administrative action has changed dramatically in recent decades, accelerating a centuries-long process of incremental evolution. This book offers a fresh framework for understanding the core features of contemporary administrative law. Through comparative analysis of case law from Australia, Canada, England, Ireland and New Zealand, Dr Daly develops an interpretive approach by reference to four values: individual self-realisation, good administration, electoral legitimacy and decisional autonomy. The interaction of this plurality of values explains the structure of the vast field of judicial review of administrative action: institutional structures, procedural fairness, substantive review, remedies, restrictions on remedies and the scope of judicial review, everything from the rule against bias to jurisdictional error to the application of judicial review principles to non-statutory bodies. Addressing this wide array of subjects in detail, Dr Daly demonstrates how his pluralist approach, with the values being employed in a complementary and balanced fashion, can enhance academics’, students’, practitioners’ and judges’ understanding of administrative law. Furthermore, this pluralist approach is capable of guiding the future development of the law of judicial review of administrative action, a point illustrated by a careful analysis of the unsettled doctrinal area of legitimate expectation. Dr Daly closes by arguing that his values-based, pluralist framework supports the legitimacy of contemporary administrative law which although sometimes called into question in fact facilitates the flourishing of individuals, of public administration and of the liberal democratic system.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 57-72
Author(s):  
Karol Kiczka

The scope of judicial review regarding the application of administrative law in the authoritarian Polish People’s Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa — PRL) was limited. The reason for this is obvious: resolving disputes between executive power (public administration) and individuals in PRL by courts functioning in honest and effective way would be an “obstruction” of the tasks executed by the communist state. The Supreme Administrative Court was reactivated in the last stage of PRL’s functioning in 1980, following the model of interwar tradition. The paper offers an analysis of judicial-administrative review in PRL in the field of university admissions. Organization and functioning of the authoritarian PRL exerted an influence on the way judicial review of public administration operated. Administrative justice reactivated in 1980 was submitted to organizational and jurisdictional limitations, as the created Supreme Administrative Court was a one-instance institution with limited jurisdiction, filled with only nine judges. Still, reactivating administrative justice began the process of restoring the proper place for freedoms and individual rights against the state, including the right to attend higher education schools. The analysis of the chosen case has allowed to identify some significant interconnected processes and phenomena in the judicial-administrative review in the declining stage of PRL within the whole domain of administrative law. One example is public administration striving for avoiding judicial review by taking a position that settlement of an administrative matter by the university is not an administrative decision. Another example is regulation of individual freedoms and rights by a multi-layered unstable system of legal sources, including: law on higher education, order of the Minister for Science, Higher Education and Technology, and non-published guidelines from the Minister of Health and Social Welfare of 21 May 1981 on admission principles and procedure of full-time studies at medical universities. 


Author(s):  
Timothy Endicott

Administrative Law explains the constitutional principles of the subject. It brings clarity to this complex field of public law. The common law courts, government agencies, and Parliament have developed a wide variety of techniques for controlling the enormously diverse activities of twenty-first-century government. Underlying all that variety is a set of constitutional principles. This book uses the law of judicial review to identify and to explain these principles, and then shows how they ought to be worked out in the private law of tort and contract, in the tribunals system, and in non-judicial techniques such as investigations by ombudsmen, auditors, and other government agencies. The aim is to equip the reader to take a principled approach to the controversial problems of administrative law.


2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 825-853
Author(s):  
Patrice Garant

Procedure before quasi-judicial boards and tribunals has recently attracted abundant comment as well as some criticism. In administrative law, rules of evidence form an important part of procedure. In this paper, the author first tries to define what are the sources of the law of evidence before quasi-judicial agencies in Québec : the common law, the two Codes, statutes and regulations. Then follows in two parts an overview of the principal rules that govern the manner in which claims and arguments are brought before tribunals and the extent to which specific provisions or general principles of administrative law allow tribunals themselves to gather evidence required for the purposes of a decision. The paper suggests that administrative justice requires that the tribunal really be « master of the procedure », within the framework of natural justice.


1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-564
Author(s):  
Dawn Oliver

First, I want to express my gratitude and sense of honour in being invited to deliver the Lionel Cohen lecture for 1995. The relationship between the Israeli and the British legal systems is a close and mutually beneficial one, and we in Britain in particular owe large debts to the legal community in Israel. This is especially the case in my field, public law, where distinguished academics have enriched our academic literature, notably Justice Zamir, whose work on the declaratory judgment has been so influential. Israeli courts, too, have made major contributions to the development of the common law generally and judicial review very notably.In this lecture I want to discuss the process of constitutional reform in the United Kingdom, and to explore some of the difficulties that lie in the way of reform. Some quite radical reforms to our system of government — the introduction of executive agencies in the British civil service, for instance—have been introduced without resort to legislation. There has been a spate of reform to local government and the National Health Service.


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