The Administration of Justice: Justice Rosalie Abella’s Contribution to Canadian Administrative Law

Abstract

Over the course of her impressive legal career, Justice Rosalie Abella has been a champion for the administration of justice – a constitutional paradigm in which the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government all share a fundamental duty to ensure that constitutional principles and values are sustained in practice. Thus, she has repeatedly urged judges to exercise restraint when assessing the legality of administrative decisions because administrative officials have valuable experience and expertise regarding the purposive interpretation of legislation. Understanding this constitutional paradigm helps one to identify unifying themes in Abella J’s administrative law jurisprudence and draw important connections between her work and other leading Canadian jurists like Justices Ivan Rand and Bora Laskin. Moreover, it helps one to distinguish this constitutional paradigm from another formalistic constitutional perspective that perceives the judicial role primarily in terms of maintaining an institutional hierarchy in which judges have an interpretive monopoly to determine the content of the law. While the tension between these two constitutional paradigms is apparent in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, Abella J’s work provides important insights on how to grapple with this tension in a productive and principled manner.