Chapter 16 Answers to the self-test questions

Questions

  1. Summarise the purpose of judicial review.
  2. What are the grounds of judicial review?
  3. In what ways can a public body act unlawfully?
  4. Explain the significance of the Padfield case.
  5. What does a claimant have to demonstrate for irrationality?
  6. How does the context of the case affect the courts’ approach to reviewing irrationality claims?
  7. What does the common law duty of procedural fairness require?
  8. What is a legitimate expectation?
  9. How do the courts apply proportionality?
  10. What are the three specific remedies for judicial review?

Answers

  1. The courts are reviewing the lawfulness of administrative or executive action. They review the way in which public bodies have made a decision and whether it was arrived at lawfully.
  2. Illegality, irrationality and procedural impropriety.
  3. By doing something which it has no legal power to do (simple lack of power), making an error of law, improperly using a discretionary power.
  4. It strengthened the courts’ review of discretionary powers, requiring a minister to use their discretion in accordance with a statute’s policy and objectives.
  5. Wednesbury unreasonableness: if a decision on a competent matter is so unreasonable that no reasonable authority could ever have come to it. Lord Diplock’s irrationality test: ‘A decision which is 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 would have arrived at it’ (CCSU v Minister for the Civil Service [1985] AC 374, 410).
  6. Low intensity review is applied in cases involving ministers’ political and economic judgment where the courts are less willing to intervene. Anxious scrutiny allows more scrutiny where fundamental rights are involved.
  7. The duty to act fairly, the right to a fair hearing by an unbiased decision-maker.
  8. Public bodies have a legal duty to act fairly where their promise, policy, or usual practice leads an individual to expect a benefit or advantage.
  9. The use of power by a public body should not disproportionately interfere with the rights of individuals. In deciding whether the interference was proportionate, the court assesses how the public body weighed up competing interests and considerations.
  10. Mandatory orders, prohibiting orders and quashing orders.
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