 Wel, joined to the final meeting session and in the final session of the 2016 public law conference, we thought that we would bring things to a close by inviting force speakers to offer their thoughts and reflections stimulated by what they've heard over the next two or three days. I will then introduce all now, and then I will talk to you, and then there will be time at the end for further discussion and questions that people might too, to do that. Now, speakers from my left are going to be Justice Davies Grathys of the Canadian Federal Talks Bureau. Professor Cora Hoepster, Fyggwaltysgrannu Unedlaethau Cymru, Richard Rawlings, Professor at UCL, and Professor Yellen Chan, of Hong Kong University, and so I'd invite just this strategist to start him. Thank you very much. This legal conference is one of the very best I have attended. There has been so much very good here, and the time available to me I can only identify a few things. One of the things we took from our opening speakers, Lord Reid and Chief Justice French, and the discussion that followed is that conferences like this give us an opportunity to compare and contrast our legal doctrine and common law rules, and ask why we have the approaches we do in our own jurisdictions. True, it has been said, we need to account for local conditions and that can explain certain approaches. But despite these, our shared Westminster and common law heritage means that shared relevant questions come up all over the place and we can constructively brainstorm on solutions. And as the conference continued with its unity theme, I found myself and I'm sure it's true for many of you, making connections across broad areas of public law doctrine here too for, seen as separate. Questions, solutions and connections, these are the seeds that grow into doctrinal evolution, progress and the betterment of the public we serve. There are many examples one could cite at this conference, but let me just identify a couple that particularly struck me. Joanna Bell, one of many very young but very impressive scholars I have seen here, spoke on how we might characterise legitimate expectations encouraged by an administrator. Reflecting on her presentation I rekindled and refined an old thought I've had but have not returned to enough which is why Canada's doctrine of legitimate expectations is limited to procedural expectations only. And then there's Eddie Clark's thesis that standards of review for procedural matters should be aligned with standards of review for substantive matters reminding me of our rather uncritical tendency to regard procedural matters as different from substantive matters. Yesterday's session with Johan Sean, Alan Beaver short, Johan Chan, Alan Beaver and Donald Nolan regarding the divide between public and private law in the area of Torch left me with far more questions than answers as did Ellen Rock's presentation on public law accountability and today Mary Liston's fascinating presentation on the role of bad faith across public and private spheres. I've had to nibble on some of these difficult questions in my day job but now I realise I have a lot more thinking and reflection to do if only one could go back in time sometimes. Attending this conference has been like suddenly breaking out in hives you end up having many itches to scratch. But sometimes a great conference like this can reinforce and deepen one's views leading to richer more valuable views. A couple of exemplary presentations and papers did this to me and I'll get to them in a moment but first let me say where I'm coming from. Admits all of the complexity in public law it's wise to remind ourselves of basics once in a while Administrative law of course is the body of law that governs the relationship between the judiciary and their duty to enforce the rule of law on the one hand and on the other hand the executives power to carry out legislative mandates. The relationship between the two of course is all important. An unduly meek judiciary gives the executive a free pass to ride rough shot over time on her such as decision making based or sorry a time on her rights such as decision making based on facts and logic the application of standards of legality and conduct in accordance with procedural fairness. But on the other hand an overactive judiciary trenches on the ability of the executive to act in accordance with the wishes of the elected government. In this tension the judiciary has the final word when a dispute arises the judiciary must decide but how? How should they decide? This becomes all the more important in politically sensitive controversial cases. In my view judges must be seen to be drawing upon settled objective doctrine or the responsible incremental extension of legal doctrine achieved through accepted pathways of objective legal reasoning. Not their whims and idle thoughts their own world views their freestanding opinions of the moment about what is just appropriate and right or their own personal sense of what in the circumstances is fair or nice. I'm in a jurisdiction where in administrative law we've largely left the nominate grounds of review and instead assess the procedural and substantive acceptability of decisions under a reasonable rubric. The central doctrine that must be developed is the standard of review namely the principles that determine when courts are justified to interfere with the executive. And in thinking about that doctrine we must remember that the executive and its agencies are not a monolith nor are the cases they deal with. They vary according to the circumstances and they defy easy categorization. So it follows the standard of review must also vary according to the circumstances. In short to use a phrase many of us know there must be varying intensities of review. In this area I was struck at this conference by the presentation of Marcelo Rodriguez Ferrer who acquainted us with Wolff and Minister of Immigration in which Justice Wilde acknowledged and to some extent defined the content of variable intensity of review. He told us that while the High Court has been working on variable intensities of review something that in my view lies at the core of administrative law and our understanding of the separation of powers he reports that appellate courts are useless silent. Now Canada could not be further apart from New Zealand in terms of geography and the quality of its rugby team. But in this area it could not be closer. Our Supreme Court often says and recently has said in the Wilson case that reasonless takes its colour from the context. But as Audrey Macklin pointed out in her presentation the Supreme Court never ever says anything about the context. I would add that while the Supreme Court seems to be suggesting that context matters some on the court doggedly maintain that intensity of review comes in only two colours complete non-deference or deference whatever that means. It's as if they view it as an on-off switch rather than a dimmer switch. Yet lower courts in Canada perhaps similar to New Zealand have been working somewhat sediciously trying to explain how context might affect the intensity of review. In Canada one might look to cases such as Farwaha and Bogard. My view silence on this topic cannot continue. If it does we run the risk of passing into the solipsism of personal preference and individual ideological and idiosyncratic views. So what is the solution? Those judges trying to fashion doctrine rather than impression must continue but it falls mainly to the academic world to do the heavy lifting to enrich the doctrine and communicate it effectively to the thoughtful parts of the legal profession and to the judiciary. And here at this conference we have seen some great heavy lifting particularly in this area. I begin with Dr Knight's brilliant piece entitled Vigilance and Restraint in the Common Law of Judicial Review. I do not think that there has ever been a better exposition concerning the scope and intensity of review a subject that as I have said lies the core of judicial review judges task and our understanding of the separation of powers and I look forward to his coming book. But that is not enough to be stable and to be respected doctrine needs a conceptual bottom a substratum of concepts promptly identified and appropriately arranged in this regard is exceptional and deserves much study and further thought and development. Legal taxonomy in my view along with identification of principles and categorization of public law is overdue and necessary. Peter Burke's work on this in the public law yielded great dividends and the task is similarly overdue in public law and related to this is a greater appreciation of the nature of administrative law and the values that animate it the values that judges in this area of law need to draw upon in exercising their discussions. Here I applaud Paul Daley's presentation and article entitled administrative law characteristics legitimacy unity legitimacy unity and indeed his presentation at the last conference concerning administrative law values the latter already put to good work in some Canadian administrative law jurisprudence. In conclusion what must our destination be? Conceptual coherence be getting doctrinal coherence honed by learning from different jurisdictions unified by their shared Westminster traditions and common law origins what destination should we avoid? Doctrinal abdication we're all wallow comfortably with words pleasing to the ear like viewing things in context and balancing all the circumstances. I vote for doctrine. This conference truly excellent in every respect has inspired all of us to work to get closer to the right destination and I offer my sincere thanks to all who made this conference great. Thank you. When Jason Varouas emailed me to invite me to be one of the wrap up speakers he described it as an opportunity to reflect on the conference the papers presented and the conference theme. He also gave me carte blanche to talk about whatever strikes you as interesting. So you see Mark altogether an irresistible invitation. In my remarks this afternoon I'd like to say something about all three the conference, the papers or at least a few of them and the theme and I'll begin there. Everyone will tell you who has organised a conference. The theme is terribly important. A good theme is capable of inspiring potential speakers and other delegates while providing focus and leading to some degree of coherence and making it possible to construct meaningful panels and parallel sessions. The trick is to choose something that will channel papers sufficiently without constraining them too much or foreclosing on stimulating and challenging debate. Did you know that there are whole websites on how to choose a conference theme? It's got to be relevant to current debates. It's got to be so interesting or intriguing that you can sustain the theme for the whole of the conference without boring people. It's obviously got to be multifaceted which is particularly so if you're hoping to attract participants from a range of jurisdictions and I think the theme of the 2014 conference process and substance in public law succeeded brilliantly in achieving all of those objectives. This one, I think the conveners managed something even better or at least just as good the unity of public law and that crucial and provocative question mark. The theme inspired a wide range of papers that grappled with questions both big and small and I'd like to pick up on a few of those big and small questions. A really big question is whether and to what extent there is such a thing as public law. What gives public law its unity if any and what distinguishes it from private law and other fields? A wonderful example of this type of engagement was Trevor Allen's paper on the moral unity of public law which I missed. I had to read it before the conference because I knew that I was going to be busy talking about something considerably less exalted which is how difficult it is to diagnose public powers and functions in South Africa. But I did read it before the conference and it is that type of engagement that this type of conference theme is capable of inspiring. Allen defended a united and coherent vision of public law that comes from a shared vision of liberal democratic constitutionalism and more particularly from a connection between legality and legitimacy. Another big question that interested me is how different fields of public law connect with each other or relate to each other and I was lucky enough to chair a session on administrative law and human rights, unity or plurality. It featured some fantastic papers which revealed contrasting approaches to this connection or relationship. Jason Various's paper was about the importance and the value of mapping public law and in developing a taxonomy of public law he took a functionalist approach and distinguished between common law review, review on EU grounds and human rights law. In contrast, Audrey Macklin cautioned against seeing the relationship as a choice or battle between administrative law and constitutional law or, as she put it, reasonableness and proportionality or possibly deference and intervention. She argued that what's important is getting courts to be explicit about the considerations that really matter when evaluating exercises of discretion that affect fundamental rights. The third paper in that session by Geneviève Cartier also dealt with that intriguing decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Doree which purported to reconcile the regimes of human rights and administrative law by means of the methodology of proportionality. It can also, though, be regarded as recognising the distinctiveness of each of those regimes. I must say that in this session as in most of the others a certain smudness infected me, I was reminded of the advantages of my jurisdiction South Africa where human rights and administrative law are not pitted against each other at all. They don't have to be reconciled simply because one of our human rights is a right to just administrative action and to all you other jurisdictions out there do give it some thought it could solve a few problems for you including the problem of justifying judicial review. Turning now to administrative law more specifically I am primarily an administrative lawyer and so I was particularly interested in the papers discussing that area and they provided a rich feast from the superb keynote address yesterday morning by Chief Justice Elias of New Zealand to the final parallel session that we've just had. Actually there was an embarrassment of riches on Tuesday afternoon I attended the early session emerging issues in judicial review followed by a later one on justifying judicial review on both occasions regretting my inability to be in two or even three places at once as I missed out on other parallel sessions that I really wanted to attend and that also featured administrative law and things got no easier today. So I hope that the speakers in some sessions that I missed will forgive me if I focus on the sessions that are actually present. Some big questions were raised explicitly in relation to judicial review and here I think Paul Daley's paper is a great example he tackled nothing less than the nature of administrative law arguing that the growth of increasingly intrusive grounds and the legitimacy of all this judicial creativity can't be properly assessed without understanding the nature of administrative law itself which he defined in terms of its openness its contestability and its dynamism. Sometimes big questions were disguised big questions about judicial review at any rate were disguised in other questions or were revealed in less direct ways and here Joanna Bell's paper is a great example she dealt with ambiguity in the doctrine of legitimate expectations which is sometimes conceived of as being about constraining the power of public bodies and at other times about conferring rights on individuals and she argued very cogently that awareness of this ambiguity is important it can have practical consequences such as whether compensation is appropriate but it also raises a much much bigger question about whether the unity of public law or judicial review in this case lies in the distinction between legal power and legal rights. Some papers started with the theme of unification particularly of administrative law and then ended with the perception of disunity I can think of two examples here Amanda Sapienza spoke about unification between systems today she dealt with judicial review of non-statutory executive powers and she started off with the hope of taking inspiration from the UK cases on the subject which have placed limits on exercises of non-statutory powers but she soon came up against contextual differences that militated against what we called a neat transplantation exercise. By contrast Eddie Clark this afternoon looked at unification within a particular system he looked at Canadian administrative law asking to what extent there's been convergence of substantive and procedural standards of review and then going on to show that there's actually disunity in relation to procedural matters in that the asserted standard doesn't always gel or necessarily align with actual judicial practice. Another category of papers took disunity as the theme from the outset. For example Thomas Adams thoughtfully addressed disunity in the justification of judicial review denying that binary choice that you all have to grapple with and that we can just forget about between legislative intent and the common law and arguing instead that there are plural justifications. Still others focused on disunity in administrative law across jurisdictions I thought a lovely example of this was Janina Bohie and Lisa Burton Crawford's paper which took the theme of Australia as an exception in administrative law as regards the distinction between jurisdictional and non jurisdictional errors of law a distinction that's been really abandoned or abolished in most common law jurisdictions as they say in substance if not in form. I was very interested in their insight that rejection of the distinction may reflect a fundamental change in the relationship between the legislature and the judiciary and that's certainly borne out by the experience in my own jurisdiction. Then there was a last theme I want to mention which I it concerns both unity and disunity and I privately think of it as leaving the mothership. It's always interesting to reflect on the immense power and influence of English administrative law and the extent to which former colonies of the British Empire have been able to leave the mothership and make their own way across the universe and sometimes having done their own thing for decades they return to the mothership either on a particular issue or more broadly and a fabulous example of that was Marcelo Ferreres' presentation on New Zealand's administrative law moment the wolf case which offered an opportunity for New Zealand to align itself with the UK's contemporary approach to administrative law but which he described as the last clear point of conscious alignment between the two jurisdictions as regards this area. Let me conclude with a few remarks about the conference in general. As I participated in the first public law conference in 2014 and as I was given the honour of being on the advisory board for this one perhaps I may also be allowed to indulge in a little comparison between the two. That one attracted about 170 abstracts 200 participants from a dozen jurisdictions and I think about 50 papers. This one was even bigger I understand that there were close to 200 submissions certainly there looked to be about 220 participants from at least 20 jurisdictions and I think every time I counted I came up with a different number but I think there were about 60 papers. I dare say it has not only been bigger but also better than the last one was. The essential and I think highly successful format of the first one was very sensibly retained but the conveners also managed a greater diversity in this particular conference both between delegates and in the range of speakers and they introduced an extra layer of richness in the form of dedicated panels for doctoral students to present their work. I think the organisation of the conference has been impeccable throughout the nothing to choose between this one and the last one in that regard and the attention to detail quite remarkable from the call for papers all the way to the end. I think that has been left to chance and I think that is so often the hallmark of a really successful event. Of course it is absolutely exhausting for the organisers and conveners and we are extremely grateful to them and to the sponsors for publishing. Finally let me say something about the social side. As we all know conferences are just as much about seeing old friends and making new ones as they are about making space for my ideas and debates. The social side of this conference has not disappointed. It was facilitated greatly by that lovely buffet supper on the first night the fantastic conference dinner last night. Two lunches, any number of opportunities, albeit brief opportunities to drink tea and coffee and that brings me to really what is my only criticism of this conference. Tea time was always too short. In every other way it was wonderful. Thank you so much. I want to start by echoing sentiments that we've already heard expressed. I think it's been a really super conference and I think it's been very enjoyable and I think it's been incredibly stimulating and like Cora I'm a veteran of last time and I thought last time was very good. I think this has been very very good. It's onwards and upwards and I really mean that. I think it's been great. I wanted to really group my remarks I'm going to do something slightly different. I'm going to group my remarks about what has been looking back and then I want to say something about going forward and Melbourne. My starting point like Cora I think was the original call and I thought that the incredibly skilled call for conference papers quote the unity of public law question mark and quote and in the call to remind colleagues very first thing we were told was that the theme is intended quote to be multi dimensional and that the organisers welcomed papers from a number of different perspectives and to save us some work the organisers then went on not to prescribe but to suggest some possible perspectives and the first one was comparative divergence, convergence et cetera a second one was the public private relationship private law relationship a third one I'm just picking out some of the major ones the idea of perhaps movement towards and can you organise the field around a common set of goals, ideas or principles and then the fourth one about internal connections within our discipline of public law, administrative law and regulation human rights, constitutional law et cetera and it was interesting to me to watch how each of those perspectives played out and of course they're all enduring perspectives and they were all represented in the conference by some very interesting papers it struck me that there wasn't so much emphasis on the relationship between public law and private law as perhaps there has been in other conferences certainly going back to the 1980s and 1990s when so many of us in different countries around the world were thinking about privatisation and outsourcing and will there be any public law left at the end of the day and all of that clearly that would have been time when that set of relationships would have had a particular twist to it and it was interesting to me that there were fewer papers grouped around that area than perhaps I was expecting. On the other hand echoing what Cora says I'm sort of particularly interested in administrative law and I found the papers grouped around administrative law particularly rich at this conference and I suppose I derive particular pleasure from that because administrative law hasn't been shall we say the most fashionable of subjects in the UK in recent times so it was very refreshing for me to see that. The theme that the perspective that dominated I think was the comparative one and the scene was set right at the outset by a fascinating discussion between Robert French and Robert Reid and then we were fortunate to listen to Charles Elias the next morning and I think those three papers from very distinguished jurists really gave us an excellent framework within which to develop that perspective. Of course from a British perspective the elephant in the room was Brexit which floated in and out of the conversation and I was particularly struck actually by a couple of remarks of Lord Reid's he told us that the Supreme Court hadn't yet got together to have a chat about Brexit and I have to say that that rather surprised me because I haven't yet met another group of lawyers that haven't done that. I also was intrigued by his explanation for why litigants continued to turn up in the UK Supreme Court talking about the Human Rights Act when they could brackets should close brackets be talking about the common law. He gave us some interesting explanations for that but I did think you can't quite gloss over the contribution of the UK Supreme Court to that phenomenon itself. I mean things have switched in the UK Supreme Court clearly but you only have to go back 5 years or so or 10 years and you get to things like the Ulla principle where there really was a terrific emphasis in the UK Supreme Court on the Human Rights Act and in turn the very strong linkage with the European Court in Strasbourg and I don't think that you can quite gloss over the influence of the Supreme Court's earlier jurisprudence on the way in which council are continuing to behave. Perhaps I might add I haven't quite got the metaphor but I had just struck me listening to Cora. Cora's very kindly talked about the UK or England anyway as the mother ship. I've been thinking about the UK as the prodigal son and maybe future generations will want to be thinking about Brexit and whether they will be coming to the conclusion that after a little bit of the more lowering flesh pots of the U law UK lawyers turn back and re-emphasise common law, old connections old origins and we will see and understandably Lord we didn't want to say too much about that at this point in time but clearly that's a very live issue for us in the UK. Briefly on the strategic use of the question mark again that flowed throughout our conversations in relation to the use of comparative materials I must say I'm rather on the skeptical side. It does seem to me that there's a lot of scope here for cherry picking and again it does seem to me a lot of scope for the use of comparative materials to justify that which you've already decided though of course Lord we told us well that would never happen in the UK Supreme Court would it. I think perhaps one gap there which does come out of the conference very strong in this conference colleagues on the bench and obviously very strong on the academic side we didn't hear we didn't really have an input from leading practitioners and I think that would have been valuable for example here we know certainly in this in this jurisdiction that there is a certain strategic use of comparative materials going on through third party briefs et cetera and I think that's an important dimension of legal practice that perhaps went unrepresented in our conversations now what I want to do is look forward and I want to pick up following on from what Cora said about diversity and I'm told that what I'm about to say something very similar was said at the obligations conference in the last few weeks and that doesn't dissuade me in fact it reinforces what I want to say because I can't possibly have we can't possibly have the private lawyers head of the public lawyers in any possible way so thinking about diversity I mean it's been absolutely terrific I think to see so many women on plenary panels and in parallel sessions and all I can say about that is that 10 years ago guys it would have looked very different even 10 years ago and certainly 20 years ago and that's a that's a great advance likewise as Cora said I'd like to really compliment the organisers for thinking about if I'm allowed to if I may dare say this the new kids or the newer kids on the block and really kind of encouraging you know sort of the new generation with all their creativity and ideas and leaving scope for them and I think that's been terrific okay what's my concern my concern remains about the representation of countries representation of jurisdictions as Cora said done better this time than we managed last time but let me just point out a few things all the plenary speakers prior to this session have come from four countries and it's the usual suspects UK Canada Australia New Zealand those four countries accounted for all the plenary speakers and of course I'm looking at Eileen over there and I know I shouldn't put the UK all together when I've got to split up but the general point is there and then second we have a little expansion here we have Hannes from HK we have Cora from South Africa again I did a very quick look at the parallel sessions and all the speakers in the parallel sessions came from eight countries the four that I've mentioned South Africa and Hong Kong and we can add in the US and Ireland so all our speakers came from eight countries now if we look at delegates Cora has made the point we've managed to be more expansive there and it's great to see colleagues from important countries in the common law globe such as Nigeria or from the Caribbean Barbados Bangladesh from that group of common law jurisdictions and Singapore and I could mention others obviously but again I'd like to emphasise that there's still quite some way to go I don't know if colleagues know this but the University of Ottawa has a what they call a jury globe research group and they go around classifying legal systems around the world and essentially there are about 100 common law countries around the world and much depends of course on how you classify and they have two big types of classification they have what they call common law monosystems where the common law is dominant and then they have what they call mixed systems of common law perhaps with civil law customary law, Muslim law Jewish law etc and roughly speaking you can divide it half and half so the point that I'd want to make here is that clearly it has become more diverse but there is a very considerable way to go and I want to say that I understand that the organisers were a bit unlucky with their plenary speakers because they had tried very hard to line up a speaker from South Africa and a speaker from India and so on and so forth I make that point does it matter yes I think it does in all kinds of ways it seemed to me we were talking about the unity of public law question mark well I thought we've got a pretty we haven't quite got the sample here that we might like to have properly to address that question and I also know that one of the reasons for moving to Melbourne next time is an attempt if you like to bring the conference to other parts of the world and to open it up to other jurisdictions and I really commend that and what I'm saying is really an attempt at a constructive contribution to that by saying this I know I understand the difficulties here right there are obvious barriers when immediately thinks of finance and I also know that there are intellectual issues here in relation to comparative law the more one broadens it out how coherent is it going to be but looking directly at colleagues in Melbourne I would like to say that I do think that this is an important issue for the future of these conferences and I do hope very much that it's high on the agenda for the Melbourne conference Diolch, thank you I suspect that the only thing between you and your dinner is presentation and so I'll be brief and especially after three very distinguished speakers the challenge is to find something useful to say let me first start by joining all my previous speakers in congratulating the organisers for a very successful conference not only in terms of the quality of the paper but also in terms of how inspiring and stimulating they are in particular to John, Mark and Jason and all the people behind and having run some of these conference myself I know how much work is involved at the back and I think all of them deserve a very great applause from all of us I try not to repeat too much of what my predecessors have already said and I agree with most of them indeed this is very tempting to say just I concur and I think the theme is the unity of public law and one big question mark is what does public law means, where is the boundary and how do we draw the boundary the core of public law is reasonably clear but the boundary is increasingly blurred and as time passes it becomes even more blurred than before and so in this respect and I share the view that the great work done by Jason on the tsunami project I think it is very important and I look forward to seeing how it develops it carifies the scope, the functions of public law, it provides us with a doctrinal basis for public law and the two themes that he has identified whether this is a constraint of powers and whether it is a rights conferring and to some extent the two are in conflict we have seen also other attempts in the conference trying to make use of concepts like accountability or good faith to bring the whole area together I think these efforts are to be commanded and at the same time I think what we can learn from private law is taxonomy is useful but taxonomy has its own limitations as well it is an exciting and useful tool but so long as it remain a tool and not a master the second theme that I found throughout quite a number of sessions there some more explicit than the others is certain tensions within public law and public law itself is a fairly large area but within this area there are tensions some more obvious than the others and one notable tension is in the between constitutional law and administrative law and one might even say that administrative law particularly classic administrative law or traditional view of administrative law is pressurised from both left and right on one side we have seen that the boundary between constitutional law and administrative law both come together in very broad term of judicial review is increasingly blurred particularly after the emergence of human rights act and constitutional law in this regard has considerably changed the landscape of traditional administrative law and underlying and it appears in a number of sessions it forced us to rethink about the functions of the court the powers of the court as well as the functions and boundaries of public law itself one example is until 2011 we have seen this very strong theme that the court still took the view that administrative law is to ensure the proper exercise of public powers and not to confer rights and following this view therefore damages should not be a relevant issue in judicial review but then of course our judicial review when it deals with bill of rights human rights context, constitutional rights they precisely are to confer and to protect rights rights that have been solemnised by state in the constitution or bill of rights and in that context damages should at least be a possible remedies and we can see this kind of conflicts in many other ways the scope of judicial review has considerably expand and many ideas have found their place in public law one just need to mention the profound impact of proportionality not only in constitutional rights adjudication but it filtered into classic traditional administrative law as well as in many other fields and at the same time we have heard that notwithstanding the common nomenclature of legality and proportionality they do take different colours and different development and different meaning in different jurisdictions constitutional powers have also given rise to other issues about the role of the court some jurisdictions like the UK and New Zealand confer only a power to declare legislation in consistence with the Human Rights Act other jurisdictions like Canada and Hong Kong have conferred a power on the judiciary to strike down legislation in either of these modes there will be issues about disturbing the past or leaving a vacuum in the future and this is this problem is more profound when there is a power to strike down legislations declaration that an emission process to a mental hospital is defective and violate the due process guarantee the consequences are we going to release all the mental lunatics into the community then or a finding of undue delay could result in the abortion of numerous pending prosecutions the past could be seriously disturbed so could the future be striking down a statue authorizing covert surveillance would result in the corner of law enforcement power that law enforcement agency could not live without so this has led the court to consider prospective overruling so that the past is not disturbed or staying or suspending a decoration of inconsistency so that the future remains intact at least until remedial legislation has been introduced but these powers raise a fundamental and central issue is what exactly is the role of the court does the court have that power an Australian court has been moving very cautiously prospective power or prospective overruling goes well beyond the scope of the judiciary other jurisdictions found that as a matter of practical necessity this power should be should exist although it should be exercised with great exception and only in exceptional circumstances others jurisdictions find that it is not an issue at all and and all these ascertainations are mentioned in one recent case is that the role of the court cannot be considered in abstract it has to be considered within the constitutional relationship between the judiciary, the executive and also the constitutional history of the particular jurisdictions on the other side we have seen the proliferation of administrative adjudication coupled with broad and extensive statutory discretionary power which threaten if that is too strong a word at least challenge the jurisdictions of judicial review and in the opening speech by Chief Justice Alias she point out the emergence of this extensive administrative adjudication particular expert tribunals and that may curtail the scope of judicial review and it is true of course public law is not just about the court but what are the proper relations between administrative adjudication which could come in a variety of forms sophistications and powers and sometimes with draconian power to make far-reaching decisions and consequences on individuals or ordinary citizens from another perspective is the court has traditionally jealously got the gains any statutory encroachment of its jurisdictions one just need to think about the long line of authorities following from the animistic decision but are we facing another challenge of executive encroachment of judicial jurisdiction administrative adjudications and through the notion of deference the whole idea of deference again has come up in a number of decisions and this would be one area that I would like to see more discussions both theoretical and practical and I echo also some of the speakers mentioned and in this area context is important but what exactly do we mean and I'm attracted by Audrey Mappin's idea that we have to identify a few criteria and context is probably too vague and unsophisticated enough to deal with this matter and other issues transparency, quality of decisions reasons, structure of decision making process are all relevant and it is not just the expertise knowledge but expertise knowledge may not be the only criteria in determining how far judicial review should go and final review are then taken back to the public law, private law divide I expect this issue to be raised and it is not as extensive as I have thought but in the last few sessions and we have seen issues about increasingly there are public interest in private law and we have one presentations of a few presentations private law lawyers and I always find that they are in sufficient dialogue between public law and private law as if to a distinct world and we can't understand one another but increasingly at least among private lawyers there are extensive discussions about issues like vindictory damages in public law, is human rights act a statutory tort and how about public interest in private law issues and these are issues which public lawyers should probably engage and we have also interesting papers on rethinking about some of the private law malicious prosecution reasons of public office or punitive damages are they really private law issues and they are private law simply because they exist well before the dawn of public law but almost in any perspective these areas or these kind of tort would probably be better understood from a public law perspective than a private law perspective on implications then and we have also heard papers about increasing and quite extensive use of non statutory powers which challenged the traditional thinking of judicial review which stems from ultra virus and statutory base and use of statutory powers and how are we going to deal with the whole range of non statutory powers so these would bring us back again to the classification and possibly bring us back to the taxonomy project we need to know where exactly is the outer boundaries of public law where to draw the dividing line between public law and private law so just to end the presentation I think it has many great ideas has come and many ideas deserve a lot more thinking and it shows us how rich the subject of public law is it also reminds us how ignorance we still are about the area and good conferences always raise more questions than you can answer and this is exactly what this conference has done so I look forward to continue our exploration of the subjects in the next conference in Melbourne and just one final was about the next conference I echo what Rick has said about I would it would be great to see the perspective of private practitioners and the way they deal with cases and sometimes I find that some of the judgments could not be explained until you know why or how the case was argued and there sometimes are reasons why a case is argued in that particular way I've mentioned that the issue of deference is probably something we need to look in further and when the conference is to be held in Melbourne and I also echo the point that some of the jurisdictions worth representing and in particular the issues faced by small jurisdictions like Hong Kong or Singapore would be quite different from some of the largest jurisdictions for example in small jurisdictions like Hong Kong we never have problems with reception of comparative materials we just need that so with this I look forward to the next conference in Melbourne thank you