The following Guest Post on a recent High Court decision is by Des McDermott. Des is an economics graduate of UCD, holds an MBA from TCD and is currently a student at King’s Inns.

The doctrine of cy-près is best known as a Court-approved saviour of donors’ charitable gifts. It typically applies where the unpredictable unfolding of time brings once-worthy intentions close to defeat, risking the loss of the funds. Cy-près expands trustees’ freedom of action, otherwise constrained by impossible or impracticable restrictions, and allows the use of funds for other charitable purposes as near as possible to those originally intended.

The cy-près doctrine has now been invoked to rescue a charitable trustee from a complete breakdown of its services. In Cheshire Foundation in Ireland v. Attorney General, [2011] IEHC 419, the High Court granted a charity’s application to use €2.8m of restricted funds for its general charitable purposes. In so doing, the Court allowed money originally meant for narrower objects to be applied to a broader goal: the future financial viability of the charity of itself.

The issue is likely to recur.

… keep reading Guest Post: Notes on Cheshire Foundation v. Attorney General

The Schechter Poultry Corporation ran one of the biggest slaughterhouses in Great-Depression-era Brooklyn. In 1934, however, the Schechters ran afoul of the Live Poultry Code, a new set of federal regulations for the industry in the New York area. The Code was promulgated not by Congress but by President Roosevelt under a recent congressional grant of authority. The Schechters were charged under the regulations with selling a sick chicken to a butcher, and also with violating minimum-wage and maximum-hour standards. Convicted in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, they took their case all the way to the United States Supreme Court. And won.

The Supreme Court’s decision in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935), was a major blow to the New Deal, and one of a series of decisions by a Court resistant to FDR’s plan for national recovery. The Court ruled that Section 3 of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which purported to empower the President to fix a code of “fair competition” for a given industry, was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the executive branch of government. 

… keep reading Joint Labour Committee System Declared Unconstitutional

The Seanad voted yesterday to authorize an appeal to the Supreme Court in the Ivor Callely case.  Earlier this month, the High Court quashed the decision by the Seanad’s Committee on Members’ Interests to suspend Callely for claiming travel expenses to and from his home in Cork.  O’Neill J.’s decision contains an extensive analysis of judicial oversight of Oireachtas disciplinary proceedings. Having concluded that the question was justiciable, O’Neill J. identified what he considered fatal flaws in the Committee’s reasoning. The case will be well worth watching if and when it comes before the Supreme Court.