Trust Me, I Know What I'm Doing! Privative Clauses and Institutional Comity

Abstract

The courts' treatment of privative clauses has rendered them meaningless. This raises an unnecessary debate about the distribution to power between Parliament and the courts. A solution to this problem is needed which allows either side to preserve their constitutional role, while also recognising that sometimes it is in the interests of good administration for the courts to exercise restraint. Interpreting privative clauses as a Parliamentary indication of the need to defer to a decision maker's judgment achieves this.