Law and economics – Double Aspect

Standing Isn’t Free

On the importance of thinking about costs, as well as benefits, of judicial review of administrative action

NB: This post has been prompted by my teaching and is first addressed to my students in Public Law 2 at Reading, but I hope that other readers, at least those interested in administrative law, will also find it of interest.

Who can challenge an administrative decision: only the persons directly affected by it or, well, just about anyone? This is the question of standing. US law resolutely sticks to the narrow view (as will be apparent, for example, from the discussion of the prospects of the challenges to President Biden’s debt-cancellation plan on this recent episode of Advisory Opinions). But Commonwealth jurisdictions have tended to take a broader view.

As Lord Hope put it in AXA General Insurance Ltd v Lord Advocate [2011] UKSC 46, [2012] 1 AC 868, (even as he disclaimed “risk[ing] a definition of what constitutes standing in the public law context”), “the interest of the person affected by or having a reasonable concern in the matter to which the application related” is enough. [63; emphasis added] This means that “[a] personal interest need not be shown if the individual is acting in the public interest and can genuinely say that the issue directly affects the section of the public that he seeks to represent.” [63] Or, in the more colourful words of Palmer J in Smith v Attorney-General [2017] NZHC 1647: “The requirement of standing in judicial review proceedings has been significantly relaxed in New Zealand. But it is not so relaxed that it is horizontal. It still exists.” [2] While there are differences between the UK and New Zealand approaches, this description is apt for UK law too.

But is this very considerable relaxation of the standing requirement ― when you need to say that something “still exists”, its existence, evidently, is a matter of some doubt ― a good thing? Or does the stricter, American-style, approach has something to recommend it? It is not, after all, without precedent in English law too. In R v Environment Secretary, ex p Rose Theatre Trust [1990] 1 QB 504, Schiemann J insisted that “the law does not see it as the function of the courts to be there for every individual who is interested in having the legality of an administrative action litigated”. (522) Doesn’t it, though?

The other view is exemplified in a much quoted (and sometimes implicitly referenced) statement of Sedley J in R v Somerset CC Ex p Dixon, [1998] Env LR 111 (1997):

Public law is not at base about rights, even though abuses of power may and often do invade private rights; it is about wrongs —that is to say misuses of public power; and the courts have always been alive to the fact that a person or organisation with no particular stake in the issue or the outcome may, without in any sense being a mere meddler, wish and be well placed to call the attention of the court to an apparent misuse of public power. (121)

The idea is that the law must see to it that public wrongs are set right, and that it matters little who commences the litigation that may lead to this beneficial result. The way I put it to students in my public law tutorials is that the people who take this view emphasise the “review” part of judicial review ― in contrast to those who stress the “judicial” part and so are wary of transforming courts into general-purpose defenders of the public interest.

But to say that an area of the law “is about wrongs” is not enough to show that it must make it possible to identify and ensure consequences for every wrong of the relevant kind that occurs. Just as the socially optimal amount of crime is not zero, so to the socially optimal amount of misuse of public power is not zero either. Some wrongs should actually go unredressed. The idea might seem counter-intuitive, but it makes good sense. The costs of a wrong, be it crime, misuse of public power, or anything else, must be set off against the costs of preventing or rectifying it. If prevention or redress consume more resources (money, time, brainpower, etc) than are lost as a result of the wrong itself, or indeed if they generate further wrongs, then they are wasteful, from the standpoint of society.

In the context of crime, this means, for example, that we wouldn’t want a police officer on every street corner. While their presence would probably deter and possibly help solve some meaningful number of crimes, it would be very costly. The cost, to be clear, is not just money, though that’s part of the story. Salaries are indeed costly, but so are the unseen opportunities lost due to all these people not doing something more productive than standing on street corners. And so, too, is the possibility that they may, if only to occupy themselves, harass or arrest people who are quite innocent.

Recognising all this does not mean that we do not care about crime and about the Rule of Law. As Lord Reed put it in AXA, “the protection of the rule of law does not require that every allegation of unlawful conduct by a public authority must be examined by a court, any more than it requires that every allegation of criminal conduct must be prosecuted”. [170] Acknowledging the costs involved simply means being realistic about the constraints that apply when our ideals come into contact with reality.

The same sort of thinking should apply in public law. While Sedley J and other advocates of expansive standing (such as Lady Hale) do not acknowledge this, some public wrongs are not worth redressing through judicial review because of the cost of doing so. Timothy Endicott’s Administrative Law textbook does make this point. Professor Endicott writes that “the test of standing is a proportionality test. … Proportionality in this case is a relation between the value of hearing a claim for judicial review and the process cost, and any process danger that may result.” (415) I think this is basically the right idea, but it worth unpacking further.

Professor Endicott’s review of the decided cases suggests that courts do, in fact, attach some importance to “the value of hearing a claim”, in that standing is the more easily granted the more serious the claim raised in a case is. And it is not exactly a surprise that courts would pay some attention to this despite sometimes embracing the justice-at-all-costs rhetoric exemplified by Sedley J’s dictum. I have argued here that something similar happens in the realm of procedural fairness. But this is only one side of the proportionality equation.

What about “process cost” and “process danger”? Professor Endicott’s survey suggests judicial interest in this may be limited, and he too has comparatively little to say about these things. I’m not even quite sure what the distinction between “costs” and “dangers” is. Carol Harlow’s article “Public Law and Popular Justice” focuses on a particular set of such concerns, perhaps dangers rather than costs: those that have to do with courts being transformed into political institutions and/or made to address polycentric problems for which they lack institutional competence.

I think these dangers are real, but there is more, too. I discussed the costs (and the benefits) of judicial review in an old post here. I won’t rehash everything I said then, but one point that bears repetition is that

all judicial review is in a real sense superfluous. Ordinary litigation is necessary in order to provide the parties with an authoritative determination of their legal position when that position is unknown or contested … But judicial review is not necessary to do this. The legal position of the party or parties involved has already been authoritatively determined … by an administrative decision-maker.

Perhaps I should have used a different word: judicial review is not so much superfluous as it is redundant, in the sense of providing an additional layer of protection to a system that could operate without it ― but at some real, and perhaps unacceptable, risk.

Be that as it may, the costs of judicial review, even those that accrue in any legal proceeding, are thus particularly significant. And some are peculiar to judicial review. Among other things, judicial review risks both unwarranted interference with the legitimate activities of government (insofar as anything the government does is legitimate) and, conversely, undue legitimation of government decisions that, while lawful and hence deserving of being upheld, are daft, immoral, or both. Ignoring these (and other) costs of judicial review does not make them go away; nor does it somehow strengthen the Rule of Law.

The other concern I have with Professor Endicott’s approach has to do with the concept of proportionality. As in human rights law, it seems to invite a comparison of things that cannot be assessed on anything like a common scale. As noted above, the costs of judicial review are not all reducible to pecuniary expenses, and its benefits are of course not pecuniary at all. How can we know that one is proportionate to the other? Professor Endicott argues that courts have not struck the right balance, allowing cases where there was no sufficient public interest in having the claims litigated to be brought forward, but with a proportionality approach, such arguments are inherently subjective.

What is more, case-by-case analysis of proportionality exacerbates what Professor Endicott laments as “[t]he irony of process”. This arises when

parties … need to be given more process than is actually due to them [because a] claimant without a sufficient interest in a matter is not entitled to be heard, but it is often necessary to hear the whole story from the claimant and the defendant in order to decide whether the claimant has a sufficient interest. (417; emphasis removed)

This, of course, only adds to the costs of judicial review: debates about standing have to be considered, on top of those of the substantive disputes.

In light of this, it is tempting to look for alternatives to proportionality in the form of clear, rigid rules. They might, of course, not be exactly right: perhaps they will allow some claims to go forward that should not, as is already the case now, Professor Endicott suggests. Or perhaps they will result in some unlawful decisions not being reviewed even though they should be. But if these rules can be applied straightforwardly and predictably, they will still be preferable to the uncertain proportionality approach, provided that they are reasonable proxies for where a case-by-case analysis would end up.

The argument for a narrower approach to standing, limiting it to those whose legal rights and obligations are directly affected by the administrative decision they seek to challenge, would have to be that this rule helps us distinguish those cases where the lawfulness of administrative action should be tested from those where doing so would be wasteful in a way that is more efficient than the proportionality approach preferred by Professor Endicott or the easy-going approach now preferred by the courts. I think this is possible: the redundant nature of judicial review is particularly salient in case where the applicant’s right and obligations are not involved, and it may be that it is also in those cases that the risks of undue interference with government, and perhaps also of undue legitimation of legally sound but morally questionable decisions arise. But this is just a tentative view for now.

What I am confident about is we must not neglect the costs of judicial review, even as we study and perhaps promote its importance and advantages. The ideals we seek to realise through the law are seldom unmitigated goods, and we do them no justice by forgetting about this. In judicial review as elsewhere, in the heavens as in on Earth, TANSTAAFL.

Shapes and Sizes

Public lawyers (and public law students) should think about government size―and shape

I am currently in the process of making slides for the early lectures in the constitutional law course I am due to deliver in the next month or so. One of them, for a lecture on the basic concepts of the UK constitution, looks like this:

Slide explaining government size in the United Kingdom

With this slide, I want to make three points that I thought are worth sharing here too. One is obvious, but not sufficiently thought of in public law. One was actually something of a revelation to me. And one is connected to my recent post on the “good government trilemma” ― the unpleasant trade-offs between democracy, government size, and accountability.

The obvious point is that government is very, very big. In the UK, it spent just over 40% of GDP in pre-pandemic years. The figure is substantially higher now. Another way to understand its size and complexity is the number of ministers, though in fairness the UK is something of an outlier here: it has as many ministers as New Zealand has MPs, opposition ones included. But the Canadian cabinet has almost 40 members nowadays ― and of course it does not need people to deal with provincial issues.

Although well-known (though perhaps not to first-year law students), I think this reality is worth highlighting in the context of a public law course. For one thing, it shows just how important public law is ― it would matter less in a nightwatchman state. As I hinted at in the “trilemma” post, if you think public lawyers are taking up too much space, one solution is to shrink government. But most people who want to ― metaphorically ― fist kill all the lawyers are not itching to ― metaphorically ― kill all the ministers and civil servants.

It is well known, too, that government is much bigger now than it used to be 100, let alone 150 years ago. Taxation and government spending as percentage of GDP is one convenient way of measuring this. Before the Great War, the UK government was spending 8-10% of GDP (except during the Boer War, when it was somewhat more than that) ― and that was a time when the Royal Navy was as big as its two nearest competitors combined. One could also describe the various areas of human activity that government regulates, as illustrated by the gaggles and flocks of ministers (though perhaps the better collective noun would be a meddling). This expansion, as opposed to the sheer magnitude of the end product, is often mentioned in administrative law, because writers on the subject, at least in North America, tend to think that it justifies the existence of a more-or-less unsupervised administrative state. It could, of course, just as well be taken as evidence of the administrative state’s malignancy. My point in the lecture will not be to take sides ― that’s not a lecturer’s role ― but this blog’s readers will know which way my sympathies lie.

Less well known ― indeed, something of a surprise to, though perhaps I am simply an ignoramus ― is that fact that by some measures government is now much less active than it used to be. Specifically, I mean the much-reduced number of statutes being enacted annually. My numbers, for the UK, come from a study by Chris Watson for the UK’s House of Commons Library, and those on the slide may be understating matters: in the last few years, the number of statutes enacted each year has fallen further, from the low 30s to the low 20s. (I’ve not put this on the slide because it might still be a temporary blip; but how long can something temporary last before it isn’t temporary)? It averaged about 100 if not more before WWII. Granted, these numbers don’t tell us everything; it may be that the complexity and/or length of statutes being enacted has increased, compensating for the lower numbers. But they are nonetheless suggestive. The volume of delegated legislation, by contrast, grew enormously from 1950, and indeed 1980, to the mid-1990s and stayed at that level until, it would seem, Brexit. It then fell off a cliff, relatively speaking, though there are no data for the period before 1950 ― I suspect it would have been substantially less at least until the Great War, and perhaps later.

This means that not only the size, but also the shape, if you will, of government has changed a lot over the last century. It is a great deal more executive-dominated than before. Parliament grants the executive enormous resources and vast delegated legislative powers, but it does not act as much as before for itself ― or rather, given the executive’s control of Parliamentary agenda, isn’t allowed to act. This too isn’t exactly a shocking discovery ― it is not really a discovery of any kind ―, but I think it needs to be kept mind when we assess claims about, for example, the judiciary’s real or alleged interference with Parliament, the important of the political constitution, and so on.

And this brings me to my third point, which follows from the trilemma I have previously discussed. It is that when we discuss public law, and especially when we discuss the changes that public law has undergone since, roughly, the 1960s ― both in the UK and in Canada (and New Zealand too). The judicial role has expanded a great deal in these jurisdictions, albeit in somewhat different ways. UK courts might be more intrusive vis-à-vis the executive; Canadian courts have been granted greater powers vis-à-vis Parliament. There is no question that, by the standards of 1950, let alone 1900, courts are more influential. But this development did not take place in a vacuum. It occurs, not coincidentally I would argue, in parallel with a vast expansion of government, and therefore of the government’s capacity for messing with people’s lives. To insist that the law used to control a government of the size and shape it has in 2022 should be as minimalistic as it was in 1872 or even 1922, or that Parliament can remain the primary if not the sole forum in which government is kept accountable as the government looked as it did in Dicey’s time is either mad or disingenuous.

This argument, by the way, does not in any way depend on thinking that government expansion, without more, is bad. Admittedly, I think it is ― I can say so here, though that will be beside the point in my lecture. But you can very well disagree with that, but still believe that an appropriately expanded government requires the kind of accountability and supervision that the courts have increasingly come to provide (in part thanks to their own efforts and in part because they were asked to do so). That said, I do wonder whether colleagues for whom the expansion of government over the last century is a welcome phenomenon might be less inclined to reflect on its implications, simply because they see it as natural, and it is human nature to think less about what one thinks of in this way. Small-government heretics have their uses in public law academia ― but then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

The Good Government Trilemma

If you like big government, be prepared to sacrifice democracy or accountability

What is the respective role of democratic and other means of holding a government to account in a well-ordered polity? In one way or another, this question is the subject of live―and lively―debates in many (perhaps all?) democratic societies. In Canada, it manifests itself especially in controversies about the use of the Charter’s “notwithstanding clause”; in the UK, about the role of judicial review (especially of ministerial decision-making) and the Human Rights Act 1998.

At the risk of generalizing, my impression is that these debates tend to present themselves as clashes between the values of, for lack of better terms, democratic government and accountable government. One side thinks that the important thing is that elected officials get to run the show as they think best, subject to eventually being booted out by the voters. The other thinks that what matters is that the government be kept in check and made to answer for its actions on an ongoing basis, through some mix of elections, judicial supervision, and other accountability mechanisms, either internal to the government (such as ombudsmen and auditors) or external (NGOs and media).

To be clear, the democracy camp does care about accountability ― especially, that provided, or at least thought to be provided, by regular elections. For its part, the accountability side doesn’t deny the value of democracy, though it might argue that it’s a mistake to think of democracy in purely electoral terms. But there is, or so people think, a tradeoff between a focus on democracy, which calls for limiting the ability of non-electoral accountability mechanisms, especially the courts, to interfere with the work of government, and that on accountability, which requires these mechanisms to get in the government’s way with some regularity.

However, I think that the debate framed in this way is incomplete. It ignores a third factor that needs to be taken into account: the size of the government in question. This tends to go unnoticed because, whatever relative values they attach to democracy and accountability, virtually all participants in the debate are committed to keeping government big, by which I mean (substantially) bigger than a classical liberal nightwatchman state, let alone a Nozickian minimal state. I’m not sure quite where the boundary of big government lies, but I am sure that all governments in democratic states in 2022 (and for all I know the non-democratic ones as well) are on the big government side of it.

I would suggest that the apparent need to trade off between democracy and accountability is in fact only special case of what I will, again for lack of a better term, call the good governance trilemma. Of democracy, accountability, and big government, you can have two ― if you do things well; many polities won’t get two, or indeed even one ― but you cannot have all three. It is possible to satisfy the trilemma by choosing fractions ― a dose of democracy, a measure of accountability, a government not quite as big as one might dream of ― but the total cannot go above two, and it will certainly never go anywhere near three. You can’t have it all.

How does the trilemma work? Let’s start, as most people do, with big government a given. A government so big it takes scores of ― or, in the UK’s case, close to a hundred ― ministers of various sorts (or, in the US, agency heads) to run itself, to say nothing of the tens or hundreds of thousands of civil servants. This, of course, is not a Kornbluthian dystopia, but our present reality. A citizen who wanted to keep track of what the government is getting up to at a rate of, say, half an hour per minister per week would have a full-time job on his or her hands. And for at least some departments (think treasury or foreign affairs, for example, but there almost certainly many many others), half an hour per week hardly seems like it would be anywhere near enough to know what’s going on. Never mind ordinary citizens: even members of Parliament would struggle mightily to keep the tabs on the administration by virtue of its sheer size, to say nothing of the partisan and career incentives weighing on backbenchers, and of government obstructionism vis-à-vis the opposition.

Realistically, voters are in no position to keep such a government accountable (a point that Ilya Somin makes in Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter). This is why taking big government as a given, as most people today do, leaves you with a necessary trade-off between democracy and accountability. If such a government it is going to be accountable for more than an infinitesimal fraction of its innumerable decisions and actions, it will have to be made accountable to, or at least through, non-democratic or indeed counter-majoritarian institutions: courts, tribunals, ombudsmen, NGOs, and journalists. Alternatively, a big government can be made answerable to voters alone, with no judicial and other interference. But then it would be foolish to expect it to answer for even fairly major screw-ups, let alone the small-scale indignities a large administration visits on those subject to it every day that ends in-y ― not because it’s necessarily evil or even especially incompetent, let alone corrupt; but because it is run by fallible human beings. And these human beings, too, are the more likely to be pressed for time or out of their depth the more tasks the administration has been given.

If, however, one were willing to sacrifice government size, one could at least hope for a government held accountable primarily through electoral means. For one thing, as the government does less, there is simply less for courts and other non-democratic accountability mechanisms to sink their teeth into. (I have written about this here: if, for instance, government didn’t take it upon itself to regulate who can enter the country, we wouldn’t be debating the merits of judicial review of immigration decisions, which are a big annoyance to the UK government in particular.) But, less cynically, if government only does a few things, it is easier for citizens to keep track of those few things, and the odds of their using their vote to reward things done well and punish things done badly improve. Admittedly, I personally would not be all that optimistic about the degree of the improvement; but there ought to be some. By trading away government size, one could get more accountability and democracy, because democracy would be (more) sufficient to ensure accountability.

At the risk of making this post even more off-the-wall, I will add that a (very) small government system would make it possible to improve the quality of democracy and accountability further in another way. As Bastiat points out in The Law, so long as the government sticks to protecting people’s natural rights instead of being an expedient through which everyone hopes to live at the expense of everyone else, it doesn’t matter all that much whether suffrage is universal or equal: “If the law were confined to its proper functions, everyone’s interest in the law would be the same. Is it not clear that, under these circumstances, those who voted could not inconvenience those who did not vote?” Some form of epistocracy, or at least a minimal test of political knowledge, could be applied without causing the same problems it must under a big government. And a more knowledgeable electorate would likely be better at holding the government to account.

Of course, I don’t expect many people to share my interest in radically smaller government. Fair enough. But I think that it would be good if they recognized the reality of the trilemma I’ve outlined in this post. Its cause ― the difficulty for voters and even their representatives to keep track of a large administration ― should not be a matter of partisan controversy. It’s a reality that needs to be acknoweldged and responded to, whatever values will inform each person’s response.

And, as I said above, the possible solutions to the trilemma are not all-or-nothing matters. Government size, obviously, is not a binary choice. A government that withdraws from some areas of activity, or abjures some forms of regulation, could be more amenable to political accountability and less in need of non-democratic accountability at least to that extent. Conversely, a government that expands in some new direction may require the creation of entirely new accountability mechanisms to address this specific development. All this should be borne in mind even if the boot of big government as I have (sort of) defined it here remains firmly planted on our faces, and other body parts, forever.

Fizzy Drink or Fuzzy Thinking?

Questionable arguments in Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule’s critique of anti-administrativism

I have finally started reading Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule’s Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State. As it says on the tin, the (very short) book is a defence of the administrative state, and of American administrative law, against criticism by those who ― like me ― would to tear it all, or at least much of it, down. Ostensibly, the book is offered as something of an olive branch, an argument for why those who suspect that the administrative state is inimical to the Rule of Law are mistaken about this, and can, if not embrace powerful government agencies vested with vast discretionary powers, then at least make peace with their existence.

But it gets off to a questionable start in the first chapter, which describes ― and pokes fun at ― anti-administrativist thinking, which Professors Sunstein and Vermeule brand “the New Coke”, ostensibly in reference to Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, whom anti-administrativists like Philip Hamburger regard as a hero of opposition to executive-branch tyranny but presumably also to one of the biggest flops in the history of marketing. I don’t mind the jab ― it is amusing, although of course the Chief Justice’s name doesn’t sound like that Coke. I do mind that the argument is less forthright than it ought to be.

Professors Sunstein and Vermeule make two main points in their first chapter. One, which is less interesting both to them and surely to most of their non-American readers, is that there is no particularly strong reason to think that the US Constitution’s original meaning outlaws the modern administrative state. The other, in which they are more invested and which will resonate abroad (indeed they assert, in the introduction, that their argument is “promising … for nations all over the world” (18)), is that the administrative state is essential for government to do its rightful work, and that its critics are mistaken to only focus on its alleged dangers for democracy and liberty. This is what interests me here.

One argument I find objectionable has to with the relationship between the administrative state, liberty, and markets, and the relationship of the law, especially the common law, with all three. While anti-administrativists see the administrative state as a threat to be neutralized,

[f]or the theorists and architects of the modern administrative state, private power, exercised through delegation of legal powers and entitlements by the common law and by market ordering, was itself a threat to individual liberty. Hence vigorous government, checking the abuse of corporate and other private power, was deemed just as indispensable to liberty as were constraints on executive abuse. Consider, for example, the question whether the Social Security Administration, the National Labour Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission are threats to freedom or indispensable to it ― questions on which reasonable people differ. (30)

There are several problems with this. First, the claim that private liberty is just something “delegated by the common law” is, at best, taking sides in a contentious debate. The common law itself did not see things that way. A person is free to do that which the law does not prohibit; he or she does not require the law’s permission.

Second, I think it’s quite fair to say that “vigorous government checking the abuse of … private power” is important. Recall Dicey’s example of Voltaire being “lured off from the table of a Duke, and was thrashed by lackeys in the presence of their noble master” and “unable to obtain either legal or honourable redress”. But to say so is not to answer the questions of what forms of “private power” can legitimately be checked by the state, and how they should be checked. Professors Sunstein and Vermeule want us to assume that refusal to deal is the same thing as a private violence in this regard, and that an administrative agency making law and adjudicating claims that the law it made has been infringed is no different from the police and independent courts enforcing the criminal law. These things don’t follow.

And third, the question Professors Sunstein and Vermeule pose is misleading. Reasonable people really should not differ on whether administrative agencies that can create rules backed by the threat of penal sanctions are a threat to liberty. Of course they are! What reasonable people can differ about is whether, all things considered, the threat is offset by, on the one hand, the good these agencies might do and, on the other, the mechanisms that might be devised for controlling and minimizing it. I think that it’s fair for them to argue that the administrative state does good things and that its critics have an unwisely single-minded worldview (whether or not these arguments ultimately succeed is, of course, a different question). But to deny that the administrative state threatens liberty is to peddle a similarly one-sided set of beliefs.

Professors Sunstein and Vermeule go on to give an example of how private law and private power threaten liberty, so that the administrative state is no more coercive than private ordering which it displaces:

If some people have a lot and other people have only a little, it is … not because of purely voluntary achievements and failures, important as those are. It is also because of what the law chose to recognize, protect, or reward. A homeless person, for example, is deprived of access to shelter by virtue of the law of property, which is emphatically coercive. In these circumstances, the creation of modern agencies … did not impose law or coercion where unregulated freedom previously flourished. They substituted one regulatory system for another. (31)

This, again, is quite misleading, and indeed the example comes close to doing the opposite of what Professors Sunstein and Vermeule intend ― it shows the dangers of the administrative state rather than its benefits. A homeless person is not deprived of shelter by “the law of property”, but by refusals to deal on the part of prospective landlords ― and possibly, at one remove, by prospective employers.

I’ll explain why the difference matters presently, but first, it’s important to see that the “law of property” would just as happily assure a person of a home as deny them one. Indeed, when we consider how attempts to interfere with the law of property have fared, we can see that, if anything, it would much rather provide shelter to everyone, as it were. Attempts to abolish private property in land and housing in the Soviet Union did not eliminate homelessness ― but they did result in a dire shortage of housing, such that multiple families were forced to share “communal apartments” with a handful of others if they were lucky, and with dozens if they were not. (My mother was born in such an “apartment” which her parents shared with seven other families.) Less dramatically and closer to us, administrative interference with property rights by means of zoning and building codes raises the cost of housing and prevents enough of it from being built ― which, of course, helps make people homeless in the first place.

In a competitive marketplace, refusal to deal by a prospective landlord or employer will seldom condemn a person to homelessness. Because landlords and employers compete for tenants and employees as much as the latter compete for apartments and jobs, some will moderate their demands to the point when even people who are not well off and/or have limited skills will find something for them. To be sure, some people will still need help ― temporarily in some cases, permanently in others. But this help can take the form of cash transfers, rather than regulation. But once regulation, often enacted by the administrative state, starts restricting the supply of housing or raising the cost of workers beyond what they can produce, refusals to deal by the artificially depressed number of landlords and employers risk becoming much more dramatic. In short, Professors Sunstein and Vermeule, like many well-intentioned pro-administrativists before them, are presenting as solutions mechanisms that often serve to aggravate problems they purport to solve.

This brings me to the last issue I would like to address. Professors Sunstein and Vermeule quote at length a wonderful passage from “The Federalist No. 41“, by James Madison ― a hero for many originalists and supporters of limited government whom they are eager to enlist as an ally to their cause:

It cannot have escaped those who have attended with candor to the arguments employed against the extensive powers of the government, that the authors of them have very little considered how far these powers were necessary means of attaining a necessary end. They have chosen rather to dwell on the inconveniences which must be unavoidably blended with all political advantages; and on the possible abuses which must be incident to every power or trust, of which a beneficial use can be made. … [C]ool and candid people will at once reflect, that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the GREATER, not the PERFECT, good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused. They will see, therefore, that in all cases where power is to be conferred, the point first to be decided is, whether such a power be necessary to the public good; as the next will be, in case of an affirmative decision, to guard as effectually as possible against a perversion of the power to the public detriment.

Professors Sunstein and Vermeule rely on Madison in support of their rejection of “a fallacious mode of reasoning that afflicts the New Coke critics of executive power” ― namely,

selective attention … to the risks of … government action, as opposed to inaction; to the risks arising from the functions of government, as opposed to dysfunctional governments … ; to the risks generated by new powers, as opposed to t he risks arising from old powers that the new powers could be used to counter. (34-35)

This is not altogether unfair: it would indeed be a mistake to only assess government institutions by the potential for abuse of their powers, without asking what good they might be able to do.

But Madison does not stop at this. His affirmative prescription is just as important as his critical point. He says that we must always ask whether a proposed government power “is necessary to the public good”. Put to one side the question of whether the public good is a useful or meaningful metric. (I have just argued that it is not.) It’s Madison’s necessity standard that I want to emphasize. Necessity is a high bar; it is not enough that a proposed power might be advantageous ― it has to be necessary. This is not obviously a prescription for expansive government, let alone for an expansive administrative state. And then, even with necessary powers, Madison says that we must “guard as effectually as possible against a perversion of the power to the public detriment”. This dovetails nicely with his concern for dispersing and checking powers explored in later (and better-known) papers.

The anti-administrative case isn’t that the administrative state can do no good. Of course it can, sometimes. It is, first, that the administrative state is often actively harmful ― on balance, even accounting for the good it can do ― such that it cannot be regarded as necessary; and, second, that the structure of administrative institutions is such that they fail to provide effectual guardrails against the perversion of their powers. The rest of Law and Leviathan is meant as a response to this last contention and, if its arguent succeeds, it will address part of the anti-administrativists’ concerns. But it will be less important part, as the order of Madison’s requirements makes clear. Devising protections against the abuse of power can only come after we have established that the power is necessary. And anti-administrativists’ concerns on this first front cannot be assuaged by simply pointing to the good that the administrative state might do ― least of all when, as in the example offered by Professors Sunstein and Vermeule ― the good is an illusion that rests on faulty or misleading claims about the nature and effect of coercion in the administrative state and in the market.

The Disuse of Knowledge in the Administrative State

Regulation is not the right tool for intelligently dealing with complexity

Advocates for the administrative state typically promote it on the basis of its great usefulness in contemporary society. Without the expertise that administrators bring to their work, they say, we could not deal with the complexity of the world around us. Although, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65, this is no longer part of the rationale for deference to administrative decision-makers in Canadian law, this view is still widely held by administrative theorists in North America. Indeed it is part of the pro-administrativist critique of Vavilov, for example in a post by Mary Liston over at Administrative Law Matters. But this view is fundamentally wrong, even backwards.

A passage from Matthew Lewans’ book Administrative Law and Judicial Deference captures this traditional view nicely. Compared to the past,

we must tackle a broader array of complex social issues―human rights, immigration, national security, climate change, economic policy, occupational health and safety, public access to health care and education, etc―about which there is deep disagreement. And we cannot hope to address these issues intelligently without harnessing the experience, expertise, and efficiency the modern administrative state provides. (187)

Other pro-administrativists, if they have not themselves written such things, would I think wholeheartedly agree with them. To the extent that I specifically criticize Professor Lewans’ argument, below, it is only in a representative capacity.

One thing to note about this passage, and its innumerable equivalents elsewhere, is that it is not supported by any detailed arguments or evidence. The hopelessness of intelligently dealing with the issues that consume contemporary politics without “harnessing the experience, expertise, and efficiency” of the bureaucracy is simply asserted by writers and taken on faith by readers. But I think we need to query these claims before accepting them, and not because I have watched too much Yes, Minister to have much faith in the experience and expertise, let alone the efficiency, of the administrative state.

More fundamentally, the state ― and especially the administrative state ― often is not merely lousy at addressing complexity intelligently, but actively opposed to doing so. The reason for this is that its laws and regulations, to say nothing of its discretionary rulings, serve to eradicate rather than harness the information needed for intelligent behaviour in a complex world. They give both the rulers who wield them and the citizens who clamour for them the illusion of purposive action and control, while actually preventing the operation of the mechanisms that serve to communicate information about the world much more effectively than laws and regulations ever can: prices and markets.

As F.A. Hayek famously pointed out in “The Use of Knowledge in Society“, there is an enormous amount of information that even the best experts armed with the boundless powers of the modern administrative state cannot acquire: information about the circumstances, needs, and desires of individuals and organizations. This information is unlike the scientific, technical knowledge that experts might be able to centralize in the hands of the bureaucracy. In particular, this local knowledge changes much too quickly to be communicated and assimilated by an authority. As Hayek explains, “the economic problem of society” ― that is, the question of how to use the resources available to us most effectively ― “is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place”. From this,

it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders.

I would add also that, even if a “central board” could acquire information as fast as individuals and businesses, it could not make new rules to reflect this information fast enough, or consistently with the requirements of the Rule of Law, which include the relative stability of the legal framework.

But how do individuals acquire knowledge which, Hayek insists, even a sophisticated bureaucracy cannot gets its hands on? The answer is, through market prices, which reflect aggregate data about the relative scarcity of goods and services available in a given time and place: “Fundamentally, in a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people” ― which is to say, in any society in which there many people, and especially in complex modern societies to which pro-administrativsts such as Professor Lewans refer, “prices can act to coördinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan”.

Hayek gives the example of how, if something people need to produce other things other people need becomes more scarce, such as its price goes up

without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction.

The right direction, that is, from society’s perspective ― the direction of the society’s overall resources being used more effectively where they are most needed. Hayek pointedly describes the functioning of the price mechanism, its ability to economically and quickly communicate information no bureaucracy could gather “by months of investigation” as a “marvel”. He is right.

But, to repeat, the state all too often prevents this marvel from happening. The state outlaws market transactions, and so prevents the communication of information through market prices, left, right, and centre, and interferes with those transactions it doesn’t outlaw. Ronald Reagan summed up the state’s ― and the statists’ ― thinking: “If it Moves, Tax it. If it Keeps Moving, Regulate it. And if it Stops Moving, Subsidize it.” This is not all the state does, of course. The state, if it functions well, also enables markets by keeping peace, protecting property rights, and enforcing contracts. They state may supplement markets by correcting genuine market failures, though these are rather fewer and further between than statists tend to assume. But there’s no denying that much of what the state does, and especially much of what pro-administrativists ― be they on the political left (as most of them have long tended to be) or on the right (as the followers of Adrian Vermeule and other ~~common good~~ will-to-power conservatives, about whom co-blogger Mark Mancini has written here) consists in overriding, displacing, and even criminalizing markets, and so destroying rather than harnessing information. The state not only is stupid; it makes us less intelligent too.

The administrative state, specifically, is especially guilty of this. To quote Professor Lewans once more ― and again, in a representative capacity ―

There are good reasons why legislatures invest administrative officials with decision-making authority. While a legislative assembly might be able to forge sufficient consensus on broadly worded objectives as a platform for future action, it might reasonably conclude that interpretive disputes regarding those objectives outstrip the capacity of the legislative process. (199)

To be clear, “interpretive disputes” here are disputes about the specification of these “broad objectives”, as well as the means through which the objectives, so defined, are expected to be achieved. What Professor Lewans is saying is that delegation of power to the administration vastly increases the state’s overall ability to regulate ― that is to say, to override, displace, and criminalize markets. Legislatures might never achieve consensus on the detail of a regulation, and so wouldn’t enact any since they need at least a bare-bones consensus to enact law. But thanks to the dark wonders of delegation, the need for consensus is dispensed with, or at least reduced, and more regulation can be enacted. And of course the administrative state is simply bigger than a legislature, so it has more person-hours to expend on producing ever more regulation. The legislative process ― at least, proper legislative process, not what all too often passes for it ― is also time-consuming, while one of the supposed virtues of the administrative state is its flexibility. Faster regulatory change, while it cannot actually be effective enough to substitute or account for the information transmitted through the price system, is more disruptive to markets.

If we actually want to address the issues that confront complex contemporary societies intelligently, the administrative state is not our friend. More often than not, it serves to reinforce the state’s ability, to say nothing of its resolve, to prevent individuals and businesses from acting intelligently in the face of complexity by eliminating or falsifying the information they need to do so. At best, the administrative state then tries to provide a simulacrum of an intelligent response ― as, for example, we ask bureaucrats to puzzle out who may come to our countries to work based on what they, from their cubicles, deem to be market needs, instead of simply opening the borders and letting employers and potential workers make their own arrangements.

Why, then, are people ― and more and more people, too, as the emergence of right-wing pro-administrativsim shows ― so convinced that the administrative state is necessary? Some, alas, are not especially interested in social problems being solved effectively. They even make a virtue of inefficient institutions, slower economic growth, and more coercion. Such feelings may be especially widespread among the ~~common good~~ will-to-power crowd. But more people, I suspect, simply misunderstand the situation. As Hayek pointed out,

those who clamor for “conscious direction” … cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously.

They think that central direction, which only the state, and specifically the administrative state, can provide is necessary. They are mistaken, and in a way that is the sadder because they unwittingly demand the exact opposite of what they actually hope for.

Entertainment Assoc, 2020 FCA 100: A New Canadian Textualism

In Entertainment Software Assoc v Society of Composers, 2020 FCA 100, Stratas JA (for the Court) made a number of interesting comments about statutory interpretation in the administrative state and the role of international law in the interpretive activity. In this post, I review these comments, and agree with them wholeheartedly. This case is an important add-on to a growing list of cases in the Federal Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court (Williams, Cheema, Hillier, Placer Dome, Telus v Wellman, Rafilovich) that advocate a certain form of text-based purposivism, which rejects abstract purposes and extraneous principles of international law in favour of specific text. As I will note, these cases all indicate a trend: a promising move towards statutory interpretation approaches that are governed by text, not the policy preferences of administrators or the wishes of unelected judges. While the courts most certainly would not put it in these terms, this is a new, reborn form of textualism in Canadian law that incorporates purpose but makes it a servant to text. In this sense, it is most certainly not the plain-meaning rule, but also not pure purposivism.

I note that there are important aspects of this decision that I will address in a later post, including on the standard of review analysis.

Facts

SOCAN administers the right to “communicate” musical works on behalf of copyright owners [1]. It filed with the Copyright Board proposed tariffs for the communication to the public of works through an online music service. After SOCAN filed its proposed tariffs, the Copyright Act was amended to include the so-called “making available provision.” This provision defines “communication of a work…to the public” as including “making it available to the public by telecommunication in a way that allows a member of the public to have access to it from a place and time individually chosen by that member of the public” [3] (s.2.4(1.1) of the Copyright Act). The question: does the making available of a work on an online server for later downloading constitute “an event for which a tariff was payable”? [4]

A Supreme Court case was on point. In 2012 SCC 34, the Court held that the “transmission over the Internet of a musical work that results in a download of that work is not a communication by telecommunication” [5], meaning that SOCAN could not collect royalties . The argument the Board was faced was that the introduction of s.2.4(1.1) made the Supreme Court’s decision “irrelevant” [6]. The Board agreed [8], concluding that s.2.4(1.1) of the Copyright Act is a deeming provision that makes the making available of a work on a server an act that is a communication to the public, and is therefore an act that triggers a tariff entitlement. The Board’s conclusion meant that it split the process into two separate tariff triggering events: (1) “the making available” and (2) a subsequent download or transmission on the Internet. In support of its reasoning, the Board concluded that the contrary position would “not comply with Canada’s international obligations” as set out in Article 8 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty (the Treaty) [9].

Statutory Interpretation

The Board’s interpretation attempted to transgress the limits on its discretion by references to international law and abstract, imputed legislative purposes. The new Canadian textualism, as espoused by Stratas JA, rejects this approach.

Let’s start at the highest level of abstraction. The rules of statutory interpretation particular to administrative decision-makers must be read in harmony with the Supreme Court’s (and Federal Court of Appeal’s) statutory interpretation precedents, particularly recent precedents. Those precedents prize two things as part of the new Canadian textualism. First, as Stratas JA held in this case, results-oriented reasoning is prohibited: see Williams, at para 48; Cheema, at para 74; Hillier, at para 33; and Vavilov at paras 120-121 re “reverse-engineering” a desired outcome. Interpretation must be conducted according to text, context, and purpose, and extraneous policy or substantive considerations should not enter the analysis. Second, and importantly, courts cannot let purpose suffocate the text, no matter how nice the purposes sound. That is, purposes cannot be stated at such a high level of abstraction that the purpose expands the meaning of the text beyond its natural meaning (see Wilson (FCA), at para 86, rev’d not on this point: “…we cannot drive Parliament’s language….higher than what genuine interpretation—an examination of text, context, and purpose—can bear”; see also Cheema, at paras 74-75).

Examples of this abound. In Hillier, at para 36, the Court rejected abstract purposes of “administrative efficiency, adjudicative economy, and conservation of scarce administrative resources.” Instead, the provision in question was limited to a purpose more reflected in the legislative text (Hillier, at para 35). Lest one think this is just a predilection of the Federal Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court endorsed this approach in Telus v Wellman, where the Court said the following, at para 83:

Hence, while there can be no doubt as to the important of promoting access to justice…this objective cannot, absent express direction from the legislature, be permitted to overwhelm the other important objectives pursued by the Arbitration Act.

In that case, the Court chose purposes actually reflected in the text of the Arbitration Act (another Supreme Court case, Rafilovich, holds the same thing, as I wrote about here). And these cases are consistent with older Supreme Court cases, which constrain purpose: see Placer Dome, at para 23: purpose cannot be used to “supplant” clear language.

Put together, the text, context, and purpose of legislative provisions must be dealt with authentically, but purpose should be constrained to “fit” the scope of the legislative text. This is a simple application of the rule that “Most often the purpose of legislation is established simply by reading the words of the legislation” (see Sullivan, Statutory Interpretation, at 193). Under these precedents, text is inferred from purpose; purpose is not a free-standing licence to override text. This is an important corrective to a potential use of the purposive approach that does away with legislative text, in support of some realist approach to statutory interpretation.

While Vavilov does not reference these precedents (including Telus or Rafilovich), it does invoke the traditional requirement that administrative decision-makers must deal with the text, context, and purpose of legislation (Vavilov, at para 120, 121) with only limited opportunity for error (Vavilov, at para 122). In dealing with the text, context, and purpose, the Supreme Court’s precedents mean that text will often be the dominant consideration. Vavilov endorses this idea, at para 120: where the tools of interpretation lead to a clear answer, that interpreted text will govern. Under this approach, administrative decision-makers are governed by statute, limited by the boundaries on their authority. They cannot transgress these boundaries, and cannot use tools of interpretation that do so.

In the Entertainment Assoc case, the Board seemed to attempt to transgress the boundaries of its authority. The Board’s chosen materials for the interpretive exercise were stated, according to the Court, at a high level of generality (see paras 53-54). For example, the Board focused on the preamble to the Copyright Modernization Act to divine a rather abstract interpretation that supported its view on international law (paras 53-54). It also invoked government statements, but the Court rightly noted that these statements construed s.2.4(1.1) as a “narrow, limited-purpose provision” [56], not as an all-encompassing provision that permitted the collection of tariffs in both instances. The use of these materials was used by the Board to herald a different, broader interpretation than what the text and context of the provision indicated. This is the problem that Telus v Wellman and Rafilovich guard against.

What is the upshot of all this? Entertainment Assoc is justified from first principles and with regards to precedent. On first principles, it restrains the role of purpose and extraneous considerations, which might not be derived from text. On precedent, it is supported by Telus v Wellman and Rafilovich, and is clearly consistent with other Federal Court of Appeal precedents. Slowly, but surely, we are reaching a sensible approach to statutory interpretation.

International Law

The Board spent the majority of its time focusing its interpretation on the Treaty. Indeed, according to the Court, the Board spent scant time on the actual interpretation of the governing statute, instead taking a particular article of the Treaty, interpreting it, and then making “subsection s.2.4(1.1) conform with that interpretation” [70]. Specifically, the Board used article 8 of the Treaty to “provide protection for the act of making a work available by telecommunication even where there was no transmission to the public” [70].

This approach, as the Court notes [75-88], is profoundly violative of the hierarchy of laws (see, for more on the hierarchy, Tennant). Section 52 of the Constitution Act, 1982 is clear: the Constitution is the supreme law of Canada. As the Court eloquently notes, under that Constitution, a division of powers exists which grants exclusive law-making rights to the provinces and the federal government. Of course, so long as powers are not abdicated, they can be delegated to domestic administrative decision-makers. Under this framework, the Constitution binds legislative actors, but within constitutional limits, the legislature is sovereign. This is basic, but as we shall see, easily forgotten stuff.

International law made by “unelected functionaries abroad who draft and settle upon international instruments” should not subvert the hierarchy of laws [79]. The only way that international law treaties can actually become a part of our law is through the process of domestic adoption of international law in a proper legislative instrument [80]. Parliament can adopt international law in whole in or in part; can change the content of international law as it is adopted in domestic legislation; or otherwise choose not to adopt international law in domestic legislation. In this way, Parliament remains sovereign because it controls the international law it adopts. This is the status quo ante, and should not be dispatched with simply because one party, academic, or lawyer likes the substantive content of particular international law instruments.

International law instruments, as the Court notes, can affect the interpretive activity in distinct but narrow ways. Of course, “[s]ometimes the text of a legislative provision explicitly adopts the international instrument wholesale” [82]. Here, international law must form the basis of the interpretation. In other situations, it might be clear that legislation, under the ordinary techniques of interpretation is “clear enough,” such that international law cannot form a part of the interpretive activity. The importance of this conclusion is that if legislative text is clear, it should oust an extraneous international law instrument, due to the hierarchy of laws described above. If legislation is unclear, and international law “may have influenced its purpose or context” [83], international law could enter the interpretive task. The clearness of the legislative text, on first principles, should be the anchor that governs whether international law properly enters the interpretive task because, again, the legislature must proactively legislate into existence international law instruments under orthodox principles (see Sullivan, Statutory Interpretation, at 314, which contemplates an initial assessment of ambiguity: “If a legislative provision is considered unambiguous, it must be applied as written even though it may be inconsistent with international law.”

The Supreme Court’s “presumption of conformity” with international law could be marshalled to support the subversion of the hierarchy of laws, and to give international law a foothold in legislative text, even where the text is clear (see Gib van Ert’s piece here). So goes the argument, legislative sovereignty can be maintained by requiring that legislatures pro-actively and clearly oust international law; in this way, no ambiguity is required, and international law enters the interpretive activity in an all-encompassing way. This is the reverse from what the Court in Entertainment Assoc held, where international law can enter the interpretive activity if it has been clearly incorporated, or if the domestic law is otherwise ambiguous and international law is relevant. Under the argument advanced by van Ert and others, the international law presumption, then, is the tail wagging the domestic legislation dog.

From first principles, this understanding of the presumption of conformity is inconsistent with fundamental, orthodox legal principles. International law should be assimilated to domestic law, not the other way around. We usually don’t speak of legislation as being a “negative-option” in which Parliament must proactively and explicitly legislate away court-created presumptions linked to laws made elsewhere. Of course, it is true that Parliament often legislates against the backdrop of the common law, as developed by courts and led by the Supreme Court in appropriate cases. But in these cases, Parliament is in the driver’s seat, and there is no doubt that Parliament can oust the common law, probably by necessarily implication, a lesser standard than what the presumption of conformity requires: see Hillier, at para 37-38, and also generally how the Federal Court of Appeal prizes legislative action over judge-made rules. The common law rules made by judges are different than a presumption linked to the content of law made by another actor in another state, that purports to bind legislative actors in Canada who hold exclusive law-making power. Expecting this positive law to be supreme over domestic law, so that Parliament must do away with it, turns the international law instrument into the driving force of interpretation. This is quite different than the common law, which is domestic law, and which can be ousted by necessary implication.

Presumptions have a specific and technical meaning in law. Contrary to the Supreme Court’s recent treatment of presumptions (for example, its presumption of reasonableness pre-Vavilov), presumptions are not irrebuttable tools that can be used to subvert duly-enacted legislation out of service to some court-created concept. As the Court notes, the Supreme Court’s presumption “does not permit those interpreting domestic legislation to leap to the conclusion, without analysis, that its authentic meaning is the same as some international law” [91]; see also Hillier, at para 38 “…judge-made rules do not empower judicial and administrative decision-makers to ignore or bend the authentic meaning of legislation discovered through the accepted approach to interpretation.” It goes without saying, then, those who favour international law cannot use it as a way to subvert the authentic meaning of text, even if it is text that these proponents of international law would rather not have. Trite as it is, the remedy for this problem is to vote, not to consult the grand poohbahs of international law.

What Does All of This Mean?

There is a unified theme to all of Entertainment Assoc that indicates new directions in law in this country. As noted above, there is a growing list of cases in the Federal Courts and the Supreme Court that, on matters of statutory interpretation, favours clear legislative text over abstract purposes; and in this case, extraneous international law. We all know that text, context, and purpose are the ordinary tools of interpretation; and that this approach is seen by many (including in older cases of the Supreme Court: see West Fraser) to eschew an approach focused on text. What we are seeing in these cases is an attempt to recalibrate the worst excesses of a purposive or contextual approach: the perhaps irresistible temptation for administrators to use purpose or extraneous tools to oust legislative text in order to expand the boundaries of jurisdiction. Down the years, this sort of approach could slur the meaning of the words adopted by the legislature.

Fundamentally, what drives this tendency is a pernicious form of legal realism that has little confidence in the meaning of words. Of course, sometimes the worst ideas have a kernel of truth in them: sometimes it takes work to extract meaning from legislative language. It is not a self-executing task, to be sure. But the answer is not to rely on extraneous policy preferences or results-oriented reasoning, which a liberal use of broad purposes can invite.

It is no answer to this trend to simply state that the new approach in the Federal Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court is the ghost of “plain-meaning” “Diceyanism” or “formalism.” As I have written before:

In statutory interpretation, a belief that text in its context will generally contain answers is dismissed as a belief in “the plain meaning rule,” mere “textualism”–notwithstanding the important distinction between these two methods. In constitutional law, a focus on constitutional text is “originalism.” None of these are arguments, but they have since infiltrated the orthodoxy of the academy.

Indeed, if I read these cases correctly, formalism is a good thing. It means that we are sticking to the form in which laws must be promulgated and interpreted. If courts believe in the legislative work product, they will spend more time authentically applying the proper tools of interpretation to discern the meaning of the relevant text. Under this approach, legislative text is the driver of interpretation, and most of the time, an authentic application of the tools of interpretation can lead to the meaning of the words enacted by the legislature.

It is important to note that this new Canadian textualism is still Canadian in the sense that purpose forms a part of the interpretive exercise. None of the cases cited throughout this post say otherwise. However, purpose must be reflected in text, not created out of whole-cloth. That is the new Canadian textualism.

While it is too soon to state what the result of this new movement will be, it is notable that the cases are piling up in favour of a certain approach. This is not a coincidence. It indicates that the Supreme Court, and the Federal Court of Appeal, have moved beyond the mere invocation of “text, context, and purpose” in favour of the text actually adopted by the legislature. These cases clarify that the purposive approach is not a licence for policy reasoning above and beyond what the text says. As Justice Stratas notes in Hillier, at para 33: “Those we elect and, within legislative limits, their delegatees…alone may take their free standing policy preferences and make them bind by passing legislation.”

Under this approach, doubt is thrown on abstract policy preferences, purposes with no reference in legislation, international law instruments not clearly incorporated in legislation, and other ways of subverting legislative text. Good riddance.

See the following posts on the new Canadian textualism:

“Clear Enough”

Romancing the Law

The “Return” of “Textualism” at the SCC [?]

Rafilovich: A Textualist (or Quasi-Textualist) Turn?

CHRC: The Presumption of Reasonableness and the Rule of Law

Worries about the upcoming review of Dunsmuir

The Supreme Court of Canada released a number of decisions in the last few months on standard of review. Many of these decisions are probably noise rather than signal, in the language of Professor Daly. One, however, sheds some light on an important issue before the SCC’s revisit of Dunsmuir: CHRC v Canada (Attorney General), 2018 SCC 31 [CHRC]. What is the role of legislative context in rebutting the presumption of reasonableness?

CHRC says there is no role. This is inconsistent with the Court’s own cases, and doctrinally, it subverts the role of courts in seeking legislative intent to determine the standard of review. This is another milestone in the Court’s tortured administrative law jurisprudence, and it brings no hope for the upcoming review of Dunsmuir.

***

CHRC involved two human rights complaints before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal [CHRT]. These complaints centred around the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs’ previous practice of “enfranchisement.” Under this practice, the government stripped individuals of their Indian Act status and denied the children of these people from registering as status Indians—for example, a child born to a status Indian mother who married a non-status man. In response to this discriminatory policy, Parliament enacted remedial provisions which enabled persons affected by the policy to re-register under the Indian Act. Further reforms granted registration eligibility to children affected by the enfranchisement policy.

The two complaints were centred around the amended registration provisions in the Indian Act, which need not be exhaustively described—in essence, the claimants argued that the remedial provisions were insufficient because they permitted continued discrimination on the basis of enumerated grounds [1]. The claimants framed their challenge under s.5 of the Canadian Human Rights Act [CHRA], and alleged that the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada engaged in a discriminatory practice in the provision of services.

Both complaints were dismissed on the basis that the claimants’ challenges were legislative challenges to the status registration requirements under the Indian Act. The CHRA confers remedial authority to the CHRT to render conflicting legislation inoperable, but a remedy could only be granted in circumstances where a discriminatory practice has first been established [56]. But the CHRT concluded that “legislation per se” was not a discriminatory practice in the provision of services, and for that reason, the complainants’ cases could not constitute a discriminatory practice.

***

The Supreme Court majority decision was written by Justice Gascon. To the majority, the CHRT was “called upon to characterize the complaints before it and ascertain whether a discriminatory practice had been made out under the CHRA” [30]. As a result, the Court reasoned that this was an issue of home statute interpretation inviting the presumptive standard of reasonableness.

The majority next considered whether the presumption was rebutted, concluding that the case did not fall into any of the categories for correctness review established in Dunsmuir. It then turned to the so-called “contextual approach” to determine whether it rebutted the presumption of reasonableness review. That “approach” was essentially a carry-over from the pragmatic and functional era, consisting of four factors which could indicate a different standard of review than the one indicated by the presumption: (1) the presence or absence of a privative clause; (2) the purpose of the tribunal as determined by interpretation of enabling legislation; (3) the nature of the question at issue; (4) the expertise of the tribunal.

The majority noted that a presumption of reasonableness is designed to “prevent litigants from undertaking a full standard of review analysis in every case” [45]. Context, then, should play a “subordinate role”, and should be “applied sparingly” [46]. Putting context in its place, to the majority, would forego the uncertainty and debate over the standard of review.

The majority emphatically disagreed with the opinion written in CHRC by Cote and Rowe JJ, which noted that correctness would apply wherever the “contextual factors listed in Dunsmuir point towards correctness as the appropriate standard” [73]. Instead, the majority noted that where the presumption of reasonableness applies, an adoption of a contextual approach would “undermine the certainty this Court has sought to establish in the past decade” [47]. The majority concluded that “…dissatisfaction with the current state of the law is no reason to ignore our precedents following Dunsmuir” [47]. On the facts, the majority nonetheless applied the contextual analysis and concluded that the presumption of reasonableness was not rebutted.

In a concurring opinion, Rowe and Cote JJ disagreed with the majority’s obiter comments on the contextual approach. They reasoned that the approach to standard of review set out in Dunsmuir is “manifestly contextual in nature” [78]. To Rowe and Cote JJ, a contextual analysis must be undertaken where the categories inviting correctness review do not apply. On the facts of the case, Rowe and Cote JJ would have found the presumption of reasonableness rebutted because of an absence of a privative clause and the potential for conflicting lines of authority because the CHRT does not interpret the CHRA in a discrete administrative regime [90]. Brown J concurred on similar grounds.

***

In my view, the two concurrences clearly had the better of the argument here. First, the majority’s approach continues a hard-line approach to the presumption of reasonableness that is inconsistent with Dunsmuir and post-Dunsmuir cases. Second, a presumption of reasonableness that is never rebutted is contrary to the concept of judicial review.

It is unusual—in the strongest sense of the term—that the majority rooted its endorsement of the presumption of reasonableness in terms of precedent. It noted, for example, that resort to the contextual approach would “undermine the certainty this Court has sought to establish in the past decade.” This is an unexpected remark. The Court has done much in the last decade on administrative law, but establishing certainty is not on the list. Putting aside all of the other issues—which are many—the problem of context provides a good example of the Court’s odd inability to apply its own precedents.

Legislative context is integral to determining the standard of review because legislatures, not courts, can set the standard of review. Dunsmuir recognized this when it held that “[T]he analysis must be contextual” [64]. This is about as clear as it gets for the Supreme Court in administrative law. As Justice Bastarache, one of the authors of Dunsmuir said in the recent Dunsmuir Decade series, none of the categories inviting a particular standard of review—including the presumption of reasonableness—were meant to be set in stone. Dunsmuir only said that deference would “usually result” when a decision-maker interprets its home statute [54].

And this is how the Court applied the presumption of reasonableness in subsequent cases. There are a number of cases in which the Court looked to context to determine whether the presumption was rebutted; by my count, at least the following: Entertainment Software Association v SOCAN, 2012 SCC 34; Rogers v SOCAN, 2012 SCC 35; Marine Services International v Ryan Estate, 2013 SCC 44; McLean v British Columbia (Securities Commission), 2013 SCC 67; Tervita Corp v Canada (Commissioner of Competition), 2015 SCC 3; Mouvement Iaique Quebecois v Saguenay, 2015 SCC 16; CBC v SODRAC, 2015 SCC 57; Edmonton (City) v Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres, 2016 SCC 47 (though noting Justice Karakatsanis’ skeptical remarks regarding the contextual approach); Barreau de Quebec v Quebec (Attorney General), 2017 SCC 56; Williams Lake Indian Band v Canada (AANDC), 2018 SCC 4; Groia v Law Society of Upper Canada, 2018 SCC 27.

I repeat these cases for dramatic effect. It is an example of the Supreme Court saying one thing and doing another—something some judges of the court recognized was a risk in administrative law in Kanthasamy [112]. In CHRC, there is no explanation for why context should be abandoned, especially in light of all of these precedents and Dunsmuir’s clear, unequivocal statement. Shouldn’t certainty be one of the underlying goals of doctrinal reform, particularly in this troubled area? Changing approaches year-to-year does not provide any guidance to courts and litigants.

Quite aside from the lack of consistency in the Court’s standard of review framework, a presumption-only approach also frustrates the search for legislative intent. “Legislative context” as Justice Brown noted in CHRC is really just a proxy for determining legislative intent. When one speaks of “legislative context,” one means statutory indicators that set the standard of review implicitly: statutory rights of appeal, signs of concurrent jurisdiction, privative clauses, statutory indications of purpose, and the like. Or, perhaps there is explicit legislative guidance on the standard of review. It was always understood that these signs of legislative intent should bind courts; this is just an implication of the hierarchy of laws, under which courts must respect law absent constitutional objection.

The presumption-only approach in CHRC raises profound challenges to the task of courts on judicial review to determine legislative intent. The challenge can be framed in the classic “rules vs standards” debate in law and economics terms. The “rules versus standards” debate probably impacts every area of law, because laws and doctrine can be framed as either hard-and-fast “rules” or flexible “standards.” Rules have certain benefits—cost savings are achieved because the rule applies to the mass of legal situations, and there is no need to conduct a case-by-case investigation. But rules can be overbroad—if they are not appropriately tailored, they can apply in situations where the underlying justifications for the rule do not exist.

The presumption of home statute interpretation can be viewed as an overbroad rule, because on the happening of a certain event (home statute interpretation), the content of the law is defined (deference). It is rooted in the justifications of expertise and legislative intent. But because the CHRC approach tells lower courts not to look to context, we simply never know if the legislature intended a standard of review other than the one indicated by the presumption. The presumption could apply in cases where the legislature did not intend reasonableness, even though the Dunsmuir factors (which could be understood as standards) implicitly set a different standard of review.

Not to put the point too strongly, but if this is the case, what is the point of a standard of review analysis? Couldn’t we create some sort of computer program in which cases are filed and the standard of review is selected by the computer? The point of the Dunsmuir factors is individual tailoring—they are designed to be applied by courts in cases where a statutory indication of legislative intent is evident. This requires some human appreciation of what an enabling statute implicitly sets the standard of review to be. But if judges simply say “reasonableness” all the time, the role of courts on judicial review is reduced to rote copying of a paragraph saying that deference applies, even where it should not.

This goes to the point of judicial review. The role of the courts on judicial review, as noted in Bibeault, is so important that it is given constitutional protection [126]. That role, rooted in the Rule of Law, is to authentically determine what the legislature intended the standard of review to be. When the Court binds itself to its own presumption–simply an evidentiary device–it subordinates its constitutional role to the police the boundaries of the administrative state.

The systemic costs of the CHRC approach are exacted in the Rule of Law and against the constitutional role of the Court. As Leonid once wrote, judicial review can be understood as a cost-benefit analysis. While the costs saved through the presumption may be high, the potential costs of imposing the wrong standard of review could lead to more administrative decisions being upheld than what the legislature intended. The effect is case-by-case, an administrative state turned loose, increasingly unmoored by law. CHRC sanctions this unleashing of the administrative state.

This is not to say that the reasonableness review urged by CHRC is inconsistent with the Rule of Law (though I think there is a case to be made on that front). But expanding the class of cases in which reasonableness should and does apply, when that expansion is not mandated by law, presents a serious challenge to the Rule of Law and the role of courts in enforcing it.

CHRC worries me on this front. It demonstrates that the Court is not looking to the underlying constitutional precepts of judicial review. It does not seem to have seriously considered the costs to its approach. Nor is it even attempting to distinguish its own precedents in creating its new approach. Observers should worry about where the Court’s mind is going in advance of its planned review of Dunsmuir.

Not That Kind of Voting

What New Zealand’s Electoral Commission’s attempt to boost turnout gets wrong about voting, and what we can learn from it

There will be a general election in New Zealand this Saturday. As is customary in such circumstances, there is some hand-wringing going on about what turnout is going to be like ― it was almost 78% in 2014, which in Canada, never mind the United States, would be considered sky-high, but is regarded as worryingly low in New Zealand. And the Electoral Commission is doing its part in trying to encourage people to vote, among other things by publishing this sleek video that recently showed up in my Facebook feed (and by using other ads based on the same theme):

The trouble, as I see it ― though I will not claim to speak for Kiwi abstainers ― is that, if you think about it for a second, this video’s true message about voting is precisely the opposite of the one it is intended to convey.

We “vote every day”, we are told: for snoozing or getting up; for dirty or clean underwear (that one, I suppose, is of particular relevance to politics); for whether to be a nice person or a not-so-nice one; and for a whole lot of other things. And it follows, apparently, that we should also vote in the election (or those entitled to do so should, anyway ― I am not, since I’m not yet a permanent resident). In other words, according to Elections New Zealand, voting for a party and a candidate to represent you in Parliament is just like making one of those everyday decisions that you are used to making, well, every day. Except, of course, that it isn’t, and in a number of ways.

Perhaps most obviously, if done with a modicum of seriousness, voting in a election is a good deal harder than deciding whether to hit the snooze button or to get up already. (I’ll call that sort of decision-making “voting”, as opposed to voting.) Voting requires one to acquire substantial amounts of information about the candidates and their platforms, about the world and the ways in which the candidates’ proposals fit or do not fit with what we know about it, and ideally also about how the electoral process itself works. (Another video from the Electoral Commission cheerfully showcases the voters’ utter ignorance about the latter point, as if equanimity were the appropriate response to it.) Relatively few people are well informed voters, and even some, perhaps quite a few, of those who are not at least realize that they have work to do in order to become at least somewhat knowledgeable ― though many will never do that work, for reasons to which I’ll presently return. And quite apart from informational difficulties, voting requires one to ponder incommensurable values (do vote, say, for the candidate with the better tax policy or the one more likely to respect the constitution?). By contrast, one doesn’t need to work very hard to “vote”. “Voters” typically have all the information they need from personal experience, and the values at stake are also less abstract and easier to sort out.

The second crucial difference between voting and “voting” is that the “voters” are the ones who live with the consequences of their decisions, whereas voters are not. If you keep on dirty underwear, you are the one who stinks. If you haven’t had occasion to learn that in the past, there’s a reasonable chance that you will learn now. By contrast, if you vote to keep a lousy politician in office, most (and perhaps all) of the cost of that vote (however small a fraction of the total cost is attributable to an individual vote) is absorbed by others. You may even profit from your bad decision, either because the politician rewards his or her supporters at the expense of the community as a whole, or simply because voting in that way gave you a satisfaction that is greater than the costs that vote imposes on you ― though again the costs to the community as a whole are substantial. Moreover, it is often difficult to trace bad outcomes to bad votes, or good outcomes to good ones. The difficulty is sometimes subjective ― a voter who doesn’t understand a modicum of economics will not be able to tell that relative impoverishment resulted from the protectionist policies he or she supported. But it is often objective. Policy is complex, and it is difficult even for knowledgeable people to link causes with effects with much certainty. As a result, voters do not learn from the consequences of their decisions in the way “voters” do.

In short, voting and “voting” are rather different activities, and just because we do a lot of the latter, and do it reasonably well, it doesn’t follow that we should do the former, or that we can do it with any competence. We “vote” well enough because each “vote” is (usually) a relatively straightforward decision and, even when it is not, we have strong incentives to learn enough, and to be objective enough, to decide well, because we are the one living with the consequences of the decision. These reasons don’t apply to voting, which involves complex decisions and trade-offs, which are difficult enough to manage even for unbiased and well-informed decision-makers ― but we lack the incentives to be either of these two things because we do not in a meaningful way bear the consequences of our votes.

Of course, I have no idea whether the Electoral Commission will be successful at persuading people to go to the polls despite the faulty premises underlying its ad campaign. But if it does, this will, I am afraid, be an additional reason to distrust voters, who let themselves be fooled by what is really a well put-together effort at misdirection. Rather, the message we should take from the ad is the one that Ilya Somin delivers in his book Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter: the more decisions we can make by “voting” rather than voting, the better off we will be. Whoever wins this week’s election should really think about that, rather than fret about turnout rates. Don’t worry though: I won’t be holding my breath.

Ideas of the Marketplace II

What we can learn from thinking about the marketplace of ideas as a market

In a very interesting post over at EconLog, Bryan Caplan considers what he describes as the “dogmatic libertarian” claim that all markets work well, as it is applies ― or, rather, doesn’t apply ― to the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace seems to reject this claim, which suggests that it cannot be true. Prof. Caplan agrees that it is not, and makes two further observations. In reverse order, they are that “[t]ruth doesn’t largely win out in a well-functioning market for ideas, because consumers primarily seek not truth, but comfort and entertainment” (emphasis prof. Caplan’s), and that while “[m]ost markets work well … the market for ideas doesn’t … [b]ecause ideas have massive externalities. … The market for ideas … works poorly because strangers bear almost all the cost of your irrationality.” I think that’s largely right, but want to add a couple of additional points regarding prof. Caplan’s second observation.

First, while it is often true that we do not internalize the costs of our irrationality, this is less true in some contexts than in others. Most obviously ― this a point that Ilya Somin makes in his discussions of political ignorance ― we do internalize a much greater share of the costs of our bad decisions, and also of the rewards of the good ones, when deciding for ourselves, in our private lives, than when we vote or, more generally, act in the political sphere. Even in our private lives, we pass on some of the costs of our irrationality to family, friends, and sometimes the broader society as well, but we do absorb a much more substantial fraction of these costs. This is perhaps a trite point, and prof. Caplan might only have been referring to the marketplace for political ideas (political in a very broad sense), but I think it’s worth spelling it out.

More interestingly, I think, it is also the case that, even in politics, there is a way in which people can be a made to internalize at least a small fraction of the costs of their bad decisions in the marketplace of ideas: democracy. This, I think, is what H.L. Mencken’s famous quip that “[d]emocracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard” means. The theory is only partly true, because as prof. Caplan says, in the political sphere “strangers bear almost all the cost of your irrationality,” but self-government ensures that you bear at least a little fraction of the cost of your opinions and decisions. When you vote for a lousy politician, or convince others to do so, you increase ― albeit usually by very little ― your odds having to reap the consequences of the lousy policies that that politician will implement. By contrast, in a dictatorship, the few who decide typically bear even less of the cost of their views than the voters in a democracy, because they are even better able to pass these costs on to others, while those who do not (which is to say, almost everyone) are even freer to know nothing and believe everything, since their ignorance, credulity, and irrationality have no impact whatever on anything. If you think that voters and politicians are bad in democratic countries, just compare them to the people and the rulers in authoritarian ones. Once again, Churchill was quite right to say that while democracy is a bad system of government, others are even worse.

The second point I wanted to make might be too obvious for an economist like prof. Caplan to discuss, but bears repetition by a lawyer writing for non-economists. That the marketplace of ideas may be malfunctioning as a result of massive externalities does not justify intervention by the state in order to make people internalize these externalities or prevent them from occurring. Market failure may be real, but so is government failure ― and there are situations in which government failure is more severe than the market failure government intervention purports to correct. Indeed, this point is, I think, more widely accepted (albeit not necessarily in these terms) with respect to the marketplace of ideas than for just about any other market. Distrust of, and opposition to, censorship, in the face of widespread evidence of malfunctions in the marketplace of ideas reflects, at least in part, an understanding that giving the state the power to rectify these malfunctions would be disastrous, both because the state is a bad judge of ideas and because this power would be abused in various self-interested ways be the people entrusted with wielding it. Unfortunately, people often fail to transpose this understanding to their analysis of other markets. Yet there is no reason why they should. The marketplace of ideas is just not that special.

Thinking of the marketplace of ideas in economic terms ― assuming, in other words, that it is a marketplace more or less like any other ― is, I think a useful exercise. (I attempted it here already.) It both allows both to sharpen our understanding of the marketplace of ideas itself (and of the related markets, such as the one for votes), and can serve as a reminder of some broader truths about markets and regulations that we intuitively sense when thinking about the marketplace of ideas, but forget in other contexts.

L’Uber et l’argent d’Uber

Une poursuite contre Uber carbure à l’ignorance économique

Certaines personnes qui ont eu recours aux service d’Uber la nuit du Nouvel an ont payé cher. Très cher même, dans certains cas. Car, contrairement aux taxis traditionnels dont les prix sont toujours les mêmes, Uber pratique ce que l’entreprise appelle le « prix dynamique » ― un prix qui fluctue, parfois très rapidement, en fonction de la demande pour ses voitures qui existe à un endroit et à un moment donné. Puisque la demande était très forte et très concentrée à la fin des festivités du réveillon, les prix ordinaires ont été multipliés par un facteur parfois très élevé ― facteur dont un client qui commandait une course était avisé, et qu’il devait même entrer, manuellement, dans l’application afin de pouvoir passer sa commande.

Or, on apprenait vendredi qu’une des clientes d’Uber, Catherine Papillon, qui a payé 8,9 fois le prix ordinaire pour sa course, veut intenter un recours collectif contre l’entreprise, à moins que celle-ci ne la rembourse. Représentée par Juripop, elle prétend avoir été lésée par le prix « anormalement élevé[…] » qu’elle a payé. Quant au consentement qu’elle a donné en commandant sa course, elle soutient que celui-ci ne peut lui être opposé vu la lésion qu’elle a subie. Elle affirme, du reste, ne pas avoir compris ce que le « 8,9 » qu’elle a entré en passant sa commande voulait dire.

Patrick Lagacé explique bien, dans une chronique parue dans La Presse, pour les personnes dans la situation de Mme Papillon ne méritent pas notre sympathie:

La nuit du Nouvel An, vous le savez sans doute, est la pire nuit où tenter de trouver un taxi. J’ai personnellement frôlé l’amputation du gros orteil droit, un 1er janvier de la fin du XXe siècle, en tentant de trouver un taxi au centre-ville de Montréal pour me ramener à bon port, au petit matin. Des centaines, peut-être des milliers d’autres cabochons dans la même situation que moi cherchaient eux aussi des taxis, introuvables…

Un détail révélateur du récit de Mme Papillon suggère qu’elle aussi se retrouvait dans une situation similaire : elle « a expliqué qu’elle s’est inscrite sur Uber “en cinq minutes”, peu avant de faire appel à la compagnie dans la nuit du 31 décembre au 1er janvier ». On ne sait pas encore pourquoi elle l’a fait, mais on peut deviner, n’est-ce pas? (Et les avocats d’Uber ne manqueront pas, j’en suis sûr, de lui poser la question pour confirmer la réponse dont on se doute.) Alors, écrit M. Lagacé, quand les gens acceptent de payer un prix, fût-il exorbitant, qui leur est clairement annoncé, pour s’épargner la recherche futile d’un taxi qui n’arrive jamais, eh bien, c’est un choix qu’ils font et dont ils devraient assumer la responsabilité.

Le droit voit-il les choses d’une manière différente? Je ne suis pas civiliste, encore moins spécialiste du droit de la consommation. Je ne prétendrai donc pas émettre de pronostic sur l’issue de la cause de Mme Papillon. Je crois, cependant, pouvoir émettre une opinion sur ce que le résultat de ce recours devrait être si les juges qui en disposeront s’en tiennent aux principes élémentaires qu’il met en cause.

Ces principes sont non seulement, et peut-être même pas tant, moraux qu’économiques. Les biens et les services n’ont pas de valeur intrinsèque qui pourrait servir à déterminer leur prix « juste ». Leur prix sur un marché libre dépend de l’offre et de la demande. Il s’agit, en fait, d’un signal. Si un service ― par exemple une course en taxi ― commande un prix élevé, les vendeurs ― par exemple, les chauffeurs ― savent qu’ils feront beaucoup d’argent en offrant le service en question. Plusieurs vendeurs s’amènent donc sur le marché ― par exemple, dans les rues du Vieux-Montréal ― pour offrir leurs services aux acheteurs. En même temps, le prix élevé signale aux acheteurs que s’ils le veulent acquérir le service, il leur en coûtera cher. Ceux qui tiennent à l’obtenir le feront, alors que d’autres trouveront des alternatives ou attendront. C’est ainsi que le nombre de vendeurs et d’acheteurs s’équilibre, et que ceux qui sont prêts à payer sont servis rapidement. Uber prétend que ceux qui ont voulu utiliser son service le matin du Jour de l’An n’ont attendu qu’un peu plus de quatre minutes, en moyenne, grâce au nombre record de chauffeurs qui étaient sur la route. Personne parmi eux, on peut parier, n’a « frôlé l’amputation du gros orteil droit », comme M. Lagacé jadis.

Son histoire est, par ailleurs, un bon rappel de ce qui arrive si les prix ne peuvent pas augmenter en réponse à une forte demande ― par exemple parce qu’ils sont fixés par décret gouvernemental, comme le sont les prix du taxi traditionnel. Puisque les prix n’augmentent pas, les vendeurs n’ont aucune raison supplémentaire d’entrer sur le marché, et il n’y en a pas plus que d’habitude. Si, en plus, le nombre de vendeurs est limité ― par exemple, parce que le gouvernement fixe un nombre maximal de licenses de taxi ― il ne peut pas augmenter pour répondre à une demande exceptionnelle par définition. Dès lors, c’est l’attente et la chance, plutôt que la volonté de payer qui déterminent qui recevra et qui ne recevra pas le service ― et les engelures s’ensuivent.

J’en arrive aux questions juridiques qui se poseront dans la poursuite contre Uber. Mme Papillon et ses avocats prétendront sans doute que le contrat qui fait en sorte qu’une course de taxi qui coûte 80$ au lieu d’une dizaine « désavantage le consommateur […] d’une manière excessive et déraisonnable », ce qui, en vertu de l’article 1437 du Code civil du Québec, donne ouverture à la réduction de l’obligation qui découle de ce contrat ― en l’occurrence, du prix payé par Mme Papillon. Ils soutiendront aussi qu’il s’agit d’un cas où « la disproportion entre les prestations respectives des parties est tellement considérable qu’elle équivaut à de l’exploitation du consommateur, ou que l’obligation du consommateur est excessive, abusive ou exorbitante », ce qui permet également au consommateur de demander la réduction de ses obligations, en vertu cette fois de l’article 8 de la Loi sur la protection du consommateur. Ils auront tort.

Car penser que la prestation d’Uber se limite au déplacement de son client, c’est ignorer les principes économiques fondamentaux que je viens d’exposer. Uber ne fait pas que déplacer son passager d’un point de départ à un point d’arrivée. Avant même de pouvoir le faire, Uber s’assure d’abord qu’il y aura une voiture pour cueillir le client ― et qu’elle sera là en un temps utile ou, du moins, assez court pour que le client ne se gèle pas les extrémités. C’est ça aussi, la prestation d’Uber, et la raison pour laquelle les gens font appel à ses services même lorsque ceux-ci sont plus chers que le taxi traditionnel. Et c’est pour s’assurer de livrer cette prestation qu’Uber doit faire augmenter ses prix lorsque la demande pour ses services est particulièrement forte. Le recours de Mme Papillon, qui fait abstraction de cette réalité, est, dès lors, fondé sur l’ignorance des règles économiques de base ou sur l’aveuglement volontaire face à celles-ci. Si les juges qui se prononcent sur ce recours comprennent ces règles, ils le rejetteront du revers de la main.

S’ils souhaitent raisonner a contrario, les juges pourront, par ailleurs, se demander quelle serait la réparation qu’ils devraient accorder s’ils faisaient droit à la demande de Mme Papillon. Il s’agirait, de toute évidence, d’une réduction du prix payé ― mais une réduction jusqu’à quel point? Si un commerçant réussit à flouer un consommateur en lui faisant payer un prix exorbitant, mais qu’il remplit, par ailleurs, ses obligations en vertu du contrat, il semble juste de réduire le prix jusqu’à celui qui prévaut sur le marché. Or, y a-t-il un tel prix dans les circonstances qui nous intéressent? Le prix du taxi traditionnel n’a rien à voir avec celui du marché, non seulement parce qu’il est le produit d’un fiat gouvernemental, mais aussi parce que, de toute évidence, ce n’est un prix d’équilibre, c’est-à-dire un prix auquel l’offre et la demande se rejoignent. Au prix du taxi traditionnel, la demande est de loin supérieure à l’offre ― d’où l’orteil gelé de M. Lagacé. Comment un tribunal s’y prendrait-il pour déterminer le prix du marché en l’absence, justement, d’un marché ― autre que celui qu’Uber a créé? Il ne pourrait le faire que d’une façon parfaitement arbitraire, ce qui serait contraire à notre compréhension habituelle du rôle des tribunaux. (J’avais déjà soulevé un problème similaire en parlant d’un recours contre la SAQ, fondé, lui aussi, sur l’article 8 de la Loi sur la protection du consommateur.) Comment est-ce qu’un tribunal saurait, en fait, que le prix exigé par Uber n’est pas le prix du marché? C’est à Mme Papillon, en tant que demanderesse, de le prouver, me semble-t-il. Je ne vois pas comment elle pourrait le faire.

Un mot, en conclusion, sur la position de Juripop dans cette histoire. Cet organisme n’est pas un bureau d’avocats ordinaire qui défend la cause de ses clients, fût-elle guidée par la plus pure cupidité. C’est soi-disant une « clinique juridique », une « entreprise d’économie sociale », dont la mission consiste à « soutenir l’accessibilité [sic] des personnes à la justice ». Or, Juripop ne se place pas du côté de la justice en appuyant Mme Papillon. Car la justice ne consiste pas à se déresponsabiliser face aux conséquences annoncées d’actions qu’on a posées, comme elle cherche à le faire. Et la justice ne peut pas se réaliser dans l’ignorance des lois économiques. Comme le disait fort sagement Friedrich Hayek dans La route de la servitude, « [i]l peut sembler noble de dire, “au diable la science économique, bâtissons plutôt un monde décent” ― mais c’est en fait simplement irresponsable » (je traduis). Les québécois le savent, d’ailleurs: ce n’est pas réclamer justice que de vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre.