15th January 2023
This is my essay this week at Substack.
The Wednesbury case of 1948 provides one of the most famous and influential judgments in English legal history.
Because of the case, the phrase “Wednesbury unreasonableness” has become well-known legal shorthand for decisions and rules made by public bodies that are so unreasonable that no reasonable public body could have made them.
Nearly two-and-a-half thousand cases on the BAILII public database use the phrase “Wednesbury unreasonable”.
Indeed, the one thing that many people outside the West Midlands know about Wednesbury is that it associated with this extreme legal standard.
But in the judgment, the town’s corporation was found not to be acting unreasonably – at least in the legal sense.
And the case was not even decided on the basis of reasonableness, but on the basis of normal statutory construction.
So how did the little town of Wednesbury get such legal infamy?
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Every week I will write an essay on an aspect of legal history, or on the relationship between law and lore/popular culture, for those kind enough to subscribe to my Substack. The essay will be posted on Friday/Saturday/Sunday. I will even sometime use multi-sentence paragraphs, like this one.
Last week’s essay was on the Malone case of 1979, which I reckon to be the most significant constitutional case of the last fifty years.
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I read the title and wondered for a moment if you were talking about the prime minister’s decision to leave the EU…
We know they knew about the lies told to win the vote, we think they knew about the scale of the Russian interference, and they ought to have known how much damage it would cause.
They also knew how damaging it would be to their party’s income stream, and that was probably their principle consideration, rather than a fact they ought to have put aside…