“Public law”, or “administrative law”, is the framework for all decisions made by public authorities, comprising a vast gamut of law. We are very familiar with some of it – most obviously, planning, nature conservation and so forth, though we do take public law cases in other areas.

The principles set out on the judicial review page on this website have planning and environmental work in mind, but they apply in large measure in all areas of public law work. Thus in the course of our practice we have dealt with several judicial review cases which are outside what people often think of as planning and environmental law.

  • We worked for many years on challenging Government proposals for night flights at the London airports (mainly Heathrow) which cause misery for those under the flight paths. Although we did not quite manage a “human right to sleep” – considered appropriate by a lower court in the European Court of Human Rights but overturned by the ECtHR’s Grand Chamber after appeal by the UK government – the Court still found that domestic law failed to provide an effective remedy in breach of the requirements of the Convention. Night flights have not increased as intended and remain at more or less the same level as they were in 1988.
  • Similarly in the air, we successfully sought reconsideration of flight paths around Gatwick.
  • The Storaa was an unusual case involving protection of the wreck a merchant ship which had been sunk in a convoy in World War II – fiercely resisted by the Government on expense grounds.
  • And, in an unusual environmental setting, we have worked for cavers seeking access rights (through “right to roam” rules) to caves in Wales.

All these cases involve public law principles; one must be used to applying the rules in a wide range of situations.

There is a (slightly) more generous time limit for instigating legal proceedings in cases not involving planning law but one must always act promptly which in practice means as soon as you are aware of a problem where it appears there is something wrong with the decision taken.

Some cases may be planning-related but have implications outside it. For example, Burkett (which related to challenging a planning decision) was important for the House of Lords deciding when challenges to government and other public authority decisions should be made.

There are some parts of public law we don’t touch – for example, most criminal-related work (other than statutory nuisance and private prosecution of environment-related crimes), education, social care, immigration, and complaints against the police. This is because there is a large body of specialist case law relating to these topic areas which we are not familiar with and there are many other solicitors who are.