Standards of Judicial Review : Is it Time to Change our Analysis ?

Le concept de l’analyse fonctionnelle et pragmatique est devenu un rituel en droit administratif et il a produit trois normes techniques de révision, dont l’une est choisie à l’amorce de chaque dossier. Tout concept technique tendant à survivre à son utilité, l’auteur suggère que la conception rettenue doit maintenant être remise en question. Il ne fait aucun doute que les tribunaux doivent accorder différents niveaux de déférence aux divers organismes décisionnels. Néanmoins, comme l’ancienne distinction entre un acte administratif et un acte judiciaire n’est plus pertinente dans la plupart des cas, sans jamais disparaître complètement, les catégories actuelles perdent leur utilité et, si elles devaient demeurer inchangées, elles pourraient engendrer un système de droit indûment technique et formaliste. L’application de ces normes techniques à certains domaines de droit est particulièrement discutable, par exemple en droit disciplinaire ou dans des dossiers touchant les droits fondamentaux. Dans ces domaines, la question de la « spécialité » d’un organisme est déjà difficile à traiter et elle pourrait facilement donner naissance à de graves injustices.The notion of a pragmatic and functional analysis has become a mantra in administrative law, producing three technical standards of review, one of which is selected at the start of virtually every case. All technical concepts tend to outlive their utility and, it is suggested that the current one should now be reconsidered. There is no doubt that courts must apply different degrees of judicial deference to various types of decisions. However, just as the old distinction between judicial and administrative acts ceased to be helpful in most matters, without ever totally disappearing, the present categories are losing their utility and, if unmodified, might produce an unduly technical and formalistic system of law. It is, in particular, questionable whether these concepts work well in certain specific fields — in disciplinary law, for example and in disputes involving fundamental rights. The issue of „expertise“ in such matters is far from easy and may often generate injustice

Does Section 7 of the Charter Protect the Right to be a Professional?

Cet essai traite du débat concernant l'application de la section 7 de la Charte Canadienne des Droits et Libertés en matière professionnelle. Étant donné qu'aucun droit absolu à pratiquer une profession n'est conféré, peut-on croire que toute la vie professionnelle est exclue de l'application de la Charte ? Dans Wilson c. Medical Services Commission, la Cour d'appel de Colombie-Britannique a laissé un rôle pour la Charte en matière professionnelle. Cette décision a été contestée par au moins un auteur. Le but de cet essai est de défendre le bien-fondé de l'arrêt Wilson.This essay deals with the controversy concerning the limits of sec. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Given that it does not bestow an untrammelled right to practise a profession, does this mean that all matters in the professional field are totally excluded ? In Wilson v. Medical Services Commission, the B.C. Court of Appeal left a role for sec. 7 in professional matters. The decision has been contested by at least one commentator. The main thrust of this essay is to defend Wilson

Duquet Revisited

En 1977, l'arrêt Duquet c. Ville de Ste-Agathe-des-Monts a réduit radicalement le formalisme qui entourait jusque-là au Québec l'octroi du jugement déclaratoire sur requête. Suite à Duquet, d'autres arrêts de la Cour suprême ont contribué à accentuer ce mouvement et, certainement en droit public, le recours au jugement déclaratoire est devenu une simple option, dont l'emploi ne devrait pas pouvoir influencer le sort d'un litige. Cette évolution doit être placée dans le contexte d'un abandon presque total des anciens recours qui compliquaient et rendaient pratiquement aléatoire notre droit administratif. Cependant, on doit remarquer une réticence, de la part de plusieurs juges, à accepter sans réserve les conséquences de Duquet. Le pouvoir d'annuler des lois ou des règlements fait parfois l'objet de restrictions. Les mots "intérêts immédiats", de l'article 453 du Code, reçoivent parfois une interprétation restrictive, et même l'absence d'une "difficulté réelle", dans un sens étroit et technique, peut présenter un danger. Ces tendances sont loin d'être universelles, mais elles peuvent avoir pour résultat d'engendrer chez les avocats une méfiance qui reléguerait l'article 453 à la dernière place parmi tous les recours, alors que le juge Pigeon, dans Duquet, avait souhaité qu'il soit "largement applicable". Le but de cette note est de démontrer qu'il n'existe aucune raison, qu'elle soit purement juridique ou pratique, défavoriser de nouvelles restrictions à l'octroi du jugement déclaratoire : Duquet devrait être accepté dans son sens le plus large

Jurisdiction, Fairness and Reasonableness

There is no doubt that in the days of procedural refinements, arbitrary distinctions and uncertainty as to the purpose of judicial review, the subject was exceedingly complicated and unnecessarily subtle. With the new dominance of relatively simple concepts, and more obvious policy goals, we may reduce the subject to a wholesome simplicity, so that both the government and the citizens can know and understand their rights. To do so, we have to consider the fundamental concepts one by one, and then apply them to recent jurisprudence and to the policy of modern administrative law

A rigorous model of reflex function indicates that position and force feedback are flexibly tuned to position and force tasks

This study aims to quantify the separate contributions of muscle force feedback, muscle spindle activity and co-contraction to the performance of voluntary tasks (“reduce the influence of perturbations on maintained force or position”). Most human motion control studies either isolate only one contributor, or assume that relevant reflexive feedback pathways during voluntary disturbance rejection tasks originate mainly from the muscle spindle. Human ankle-control experiments were performed, using three task instructions and three perturbation characteristics to evoke a wide range of responses to force perturbations. During position tasks, subjects (n = 10) resisted the perturbations, becoming more stiff than when being relaxed (i.e., the relax task). During force tasks, subjects were instructed to minimize force changes and actively gave way to imposed forces, thus becoming more compliant than during relax tasks. Subsequently, linear physiological models were fitted to the experimental data. Inhibitory, as well as excitatory force feedback, was needed to account for the full range of measured experimental behaviors. In conclusion, force feedback plays an important role in the studied motion control tasks (excitatory during position tasks and inhibitory during force tasks), implying that spindle-mediated feedback is not the only significant adaptive system that contributes to the maintenance of posture or force

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Standards of Judicial Review : Is it Time to Change our Analysis ?

Le concept de l’analyse fonctionnelle et pragmatique est devenu un rituel en droit administratif et il a produit trois normes techniques de révision, dont l’une est choisie à l’amorce de chaque dossier. Tout concept technique tendant à survivre à son utilité, l’auteur suggère que la conception rettenue doit maintenant être remise en question. Il ne fait aucun doute que les tribunaux doivent accorder différents niveaux de déférence aux divers organismes décisionnels. Néanmoins, comme l’ancienne distinction entre un acte administratif et un acte judiciaire n’est plus pertinente dans la plupart des cas, sans jamais disparaître complètement, les catégories actuelles perdent leur utilité et, si elles devaient demeurer inchangées, elles pourraient engendrer un système de droit indûment technique et formaliste. L’application de ces normes techniques à certains domaines de droit est particulièrement discutable, par exemple en droit disciplinaire ou dans des dossiers touchant les droits fondamentaux. Dans ces domaines, la question de la « spécialité » d’un organisme est déjà difficile à traiter et elle pourrait facilement donner naissance à de graves injustices.The notion of a pragmatic and functional analysis has become a mantra in administrative law, producing three technical standards of review, one of which is selected at the start of virtually every case. All technical concepts tend to outlive their utility and, it is suggested that the current one should now be reconsidered. There is no doubt that courts must apply different degrees of judicial deference to various types of decisions. However, just as the old distinction between judicial and administrative acts ceased to be helpful in most matters, without ever totally disappearing, the present categories are losing their utility and, if unmodified, might produce an unduly technical and formalistic system of law. It is, in particular, questionable whether these concepts work well in certain specific fields — in disciplinary law, for example and in disputes involving fundamental rights. The issue of „expertise“ in such matters is far from easy and may often generate injustice

Jurisdiction, Fairness and Reasonableness

There is no doubt that in the days of procedural refinements, arbitrary distinctions and uncertainty as to the purpose of judicial review, the subject was exceedingly complicated and unnecessarily subtle. With the new dominance of relatively simple concepts, and more obvious policy goals, we may reduce the subject to a wholesome simplicity, so that both the government and the citizens can know and understand their rights. To do so, we have to consider the fundamental concepts one by one, and then apply them to recent jurisprudence and to the policy of modern administrative law