The UK Supreme Court's judgment in In the matter of an application by JR87 and another for Judicial Review , that religious education in Northern Ireland breached the Human Rights Act 1998, turned in significant part on a disconnect between statutory rights and administrative reality. While the judgment is a landmark in the history of the teaching of religion in state schools in Northern Ireland and a significant case in the growing corpus of human rights jurisprudence on religious education, this case note demonstrates how it also reveals the neglected salience of administrative burden – an idea central to public administration theory – to the practice of contemporary public law.
Somers‐Joce et al. (2026) studied this question.