ABSTRACT
Government may want to protect public decision makers from judicial review of their decisions for a number of reasons. In some cases, there may be a pressing need for ‘finality in administration’; for example, where a large public project, such as the construction of a motorway, is at risk of being held up by uncertainty during the period in which a person could ordinarily apply for judicial review. In such a case, even the requirement that an application for permission to apply for judicial review be made ‘promptly and in any event within three months’ (see below, 17.3.1) may be considered too long to leave such a project ‘in the air’. Another reason that government may be ‘anti-’ judicial review may be simply that it believes that the public authority would be better off without the interference of the courts in its decision making process. Bearing in mind that the government is the most frequent respondent to judicial review applications, we might expect this latter train of reasoning not to be uncommon!
