[KaiserPro]

And ofcourse Mr Grayling has done his best to destroy Judicial reviews that highlight this kind of problem.

Basically if you want to challenge a law, a judicial review is the only way you can go about it (going through the political process, writing to an MP and the like leaves you open to the whim of the press and "public opinion")

http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/governance/news/content/18682/...

If this law goes through only those with significant amount of cash can ever challenge illegal laws. Combine that with the changes to legal aid, mean that only the rich will be able to attain justice.

[cmdkeen]

At what point has the judicial review become merely the means for judges to disagree with government policy? This wasn't a law change, this was a change to an existing policy about what prisoners could receive in parcels. Judicial review seems to have become an all too regular occurrence used by people who don't like what a particular government is doing.

[pixl97]

>Judicial review seems to have become an all too regular occurrence used by people who don't like what a particular government is doing.

Could it be because what the particular government is doing is ethically wrong. It's easy to look at the past and say 'why didn't people change these things, it's obvious they were wrong.', but then we look at judicial review and say, 'well, they are just giving the government trouble'. Don't you think that's exactly what the people that defended slavery would have said? Or the people that didn't want women to have voting rights? Or any number of anything we take as rights under the law?

[KaiserPro]

But the point of british law is that no one is above it. A precedence set by the magna carta. (which has now been superseded apart from two clauses.)

This means that if the government changes policy, and that policy change is incompatible with the law, it must be changed. This is the mecanism that would stop the government from passing a statutory instrument(a law that requires no vote in parliament) to allow the Treasury to take assets without due process (something that was protected by the magna carta, but was recently repealed)

How ever for a law to be challenged, a judicial review must be triggered.

[cmdkeen]

Except many judicial reviews aren't about the legality of the decision, merely the way the decision has been made.

"Judicial review is a type of court proceeding in which a judge reviews the lawfulness of a decision or action made by a public body. In other words, judicial reviews are a challenge to the way in which a decision has been made, rather than the rights and wrongs of the conclusion reached. It is not really concerned with the conclusions of that process and whether those were 'right', as long as the right procedures have been followed. The court will not substitute what it thinks is the 'correct' decision."

[http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/nov/19/judicia...]

[dragonwriter]

> Except many judicial reviews aren't about the legality of the decision, merely the way the decision has been made

But isn't that an essential feature of the constitutional structure of the UK: given that the UK doesn't have a separation of powers system in which various entities within government have limited powers, any decision by government that is within the sovereign power of the government is substantively legally, the only question of its legality is whether or not it is a valid decision of the government, made by the means legally prescribed by the government for the kind of decision it is -- but this can look at like review of the legality of the substance of the decision, because the legally prescribed mechanism for a decision may vary based on the substance of the decision.

(In a sense, this is true of any sovereign government, even, e.g., the US separation of powers system, wherein the "way the decision has been made", in order to be legal, for certain decisions involves a Constitutional Amendment.)