Judicial Review of Administrative Action is Always Interesting: Kennedy v. The Charity Commissioner 2014 UKSC 20

Towards the beginning of his classic essay "The Core of the Case against Judicial Review", Jeremy Waldron notes that his argument is not directed against review of executive action, that is, most of what we conventionally call administrative law.

The exclusion has always struck me as strange. Waldron's argument is that courts are ill-suited relative to the political branches to determining questions involving rights. For precisely this reason, many supporters of 'political constitutionalism' would prefer the judiciary to withdraw from the field of judicial review of legislation.

Yet courts engaged in judicial review of administrative action end up determining just these sorts of questions on a regular basis. A remarkable recent example is the decision of the UK Supreme Court in Kennedy v. The Charity Commissioner 2014 UKSC 20.