Home / The English constitution / Judicial review
Key concept
The process by which courts check whether public bodies have acted lawfully, and one of the main arenas of the constitutional argument.
Judicial review is the process by which courts decide whether a public body acted lawfully. The court does not ask whether the decision was right or wise. It asks only whether it was taken with legal power, fairly and rationally. If not, the court can quash it and send it back.
The classic grounds are illegality, where a body acts beyond its powers, irrationality, the Wednesbury test of a decision no reasonable body could reach, and procedural impropriety, an unfair process. Where Convention rights are engaged, courts also apply proportionality, a stricter test.
From the 1960s onward judicial review reached into areas once treated as pure politics. The GCHQ case opened up the prerogative to review, and the Miller cases on triggering Brexit and on the prorogation of Parliament pushed it to the constitutional frontier. Supporters call this the rule of law holding ministers to account. Critics call it judges stepping into politics, which is the central worry of the legal constitution.
Government has tried to trim it. The Independent Review of Administrative Law in 2021 and the Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022 made changes at the edges, without touching the core. It remains, for Starkey, a key channel through which power left elected politics.
It is a way for courts to check that public bodies follow the law. It looks at how a decision was made, not whether it was the right call.
Yes. Individuals and organisations with sufficient standing can ask a court to review whether a government decision was lawful.
No. An appeal re-examines the merits of a decision. Judicial review only examines its lawfulness.
