ABSTRACT
The tension between the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and the role of the courts in safeguarding against abuse of power also manifests itself in jurisdictional matters. On a number of occasions, the legislature has attempted to exclude judicial review by the use of ‘ouster clauses’. Such attempts have been viewed with considerable suspicion by the judiciary, such that recourse to the courts may not be excluded except by the clearest of terms. The best known judicial reaction of a legislative attempt to oust the jurisdiction of the courts was in Anisminic,13 where s 4 of the Foreign Compensation Act 1950 provided that decisions of the Foreign Compensation Commission ‘shall not be called into question in any court of law’. Taken at its word, this could have prevented challenge to even the most blatantly unlawful decisions. Ultimately, the House of Lords held that, if Parliament had intended the ouster clause to cover unlawful decisions as well as lawful ones, much clearer wording would have been used. Since Anisminic, parliamentary drafters have tried to find a form of words that will prove to be judge-proof.14
