Cart Challenges, Empirical Methods, and Effectiveness of Judicial Review

Abstract

This paper considersmethodological standards in public law scholarship, showing the perils of current issues with access to relevant data and the promise of what can be achieved using better data and computational methods. It focusses on the effectiveness of Cart challenges – the largest group of claims for judicial review in the High Court – and discusses how the empirical question of the effectiveness of judicial review is linked with the normative question of what counts as ‘success’. The article demonstrates the perils of inattention to data limitations in the analyses of Cart claims by the Independent Review of Administrative Law and by the government and shows the promise of better data and computational methods through an unprecedented empirical study of Upper Tribunal decisions that followed Cart judicial reviews. It concludes that the government's claim that Cart challenges are a disproportionate burden on resources lacks adequate empirical basis.