ABSTRACT
The common law represents an ongoing negotiation between past precedents and present-day principles and policies. If, as will be argued, the basis of the common law and judicial review in particular is the courts’ duty to protect the individual from the effects of dominant power, then we must look to where that dominant power will increasingly reside. In the past, that power resided predominantly with the state. The future promises to be one with metanational private organisations disrupting that monopoly of power through their contractual relationships with us. Not if but when that situation materialises, the public-private function distinction that presently delineates the application of judicial review principles will increasingly sound quaint. We should therefore turn our attention to examining how judicial review principles – developed over centuries to control dominant state-based power – can be adapted to regulate the contractual relationships between powerful private organisations and us. This has possible wide-ranging implications, including a growing irrelevance of judicial review procedure, and contract law doctrines exerting at least an anchoring effect on how judicial review principles evolve.
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Liang, Calvin, The Application of Administrative Law Principles in Private Law: The Case for Convergence (September 1, 2020). Singapore Journal of Legal Studies, September 2020, pp 427-447.
First posted 2021-01-14 17:26:58
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