Centre d'Excellence Europe Capitole

The emergence of a European administrative law is recent. This strong trend emerged less than two years ago. This is a border-related topic by definition. The incentive here is that of a thesis policy: the European Parliament's power of self-organization and the effects of community law on the concept of administrative tender agreements are two theses led by a member of IRDEIC, one of which is co-supervised by a Professor who is an administrative proponent.

The risk is that the very concept of European administrative law remains controversial or undefined.

More than ten years ago, Jörg Gerkrath’s thesis: “L’émergence d’un droit constitutionnel pour l’Europe” (The Emergence of a Constitutional Law for Europe) (pub. The University of Brussels, 1997) marked a doctrinal movement, part of which saw other more specific theses supporting the traditional concepts of constitutional law (sovereignty, control of constitutionality, separation of powers, etc.) subjected to a review in the light of community law. The apparent failure of the formal “constitutionalisation” the Treaty intended to achieve by establishing a Constitution for Europe has not quashed the reality of an increasingly evident European constitutional right, in the sense that the constitutional right of Member States can be conceived of to a lesser and lesser extent by disregarding membership to the European Union, which now sees the emergence of another key phenomenon: a European administrative law whose components and challenges are to be considered.

The belief here is that the future of European Union law, in terms of its doctrinal and academic aspects, will progressively see the clearer emergence of a European public law to be placed under Europeanist review, and a substantive law to be increasingly assimilated by means of its discipline-related variations. This European public law will be formed by the Union’s constitutional law, the Union's administrative law and the Union’s public finances in addition to the IRDEIC which has already started working on these aspects.

The idea here is to expand some of the recent IRDEIC programmes that have drafted some of the Union's sections on administrative law with a view to standardising the approach and allow the Institute, by 2014, to address the study on “European public law” at a broader level, from a more in-depth perspective on the three aspects concerned (constitutional, administrative and financial) by this future discipline.

The study will be divided into two phases:

1. The Study of European Union Administrative Law.
2. Rebuilding of Administrative Law for Member States.