It cannot be that Legislatures, being rational, seek to break down the fences they have erected around individual tribunals and let them roam at large by the simple expedient of a privative clause. The clause must be read in the context of the statute. It cannot be intended to transform tribunals into judicial libertines.
The decision of the House of Lords in Anisminic Ltd v Foreign Compensation Commission was hailed as a landmark, permitting almost unlimited judicial review into the activities of administrative bodies and inferior courts. De Smith commented
is not the practical effect of the decision [in Anisminic] … to obliterate the distinction between reviewable errors on matters going to jurisdiction and errors which are normally unreviewable (otherwise than on appeal) because they “go to the merits” of the decision?
Yet the decisions which have followed Anisminic even in England have revealed that the case has contributed little certainty to an area in which apparently irreconcilable decisions proliferate.