Administrative law has been the object of thorough reform in various European jurisdictions. This process of transformation has considerable impacts on administrative legal scholarship in the respective countries. Profound changes in administrative activity have established new forms of administrative institutions which raise issues of legitimacy. Besides the consensus that administrative law, administrative activities, and administrative institutions have to be legitimate, the concept of legitimacy with respect to a common European framework is more than ambiguous. An analysis of the concept of legitimacy in different national legal systems promises valuable results for a discussion on the European Union level. Although the respective jurisdictions have different starting points with respect to issues of legitimacy, common sources can be detected. This is necessary in shaping and analyzing administrative law in the EU. This book comprises the results of the third workshop of the Dornburg Research Group of New Administrative Law, which took place in Paris in October 2009. The Dornburg Research Group of New Administrative Law was founded at Dornburg Castle near Jena, Germany, in 2005. Its purpose is a long-term transnational exchange of ideas between administrative law scholars from European jurisdictions.

The book analyses the administrative system in the European Union with a focus on the efficiency and legitimacy of the administrative practices. In the analysis three distinct theoretical perspectives are used (a structural, a procedural and a cultural), thus ensuring that a broad variety of factors are included.

This timely book explores pertinent questions around the legitimacy and effectiveness of EU agencies’ soft law, with a particular focus on the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). It examines the variety of ESMA’s existing and newly granted soft law-making powers, which were intended to deal with the lack of effectiveness of its predecessor but are now called into question due to the ‘hard’ effect of these soft laws.

This book presents a comparison of the development of legitimate expectations and proportionality in European and English law against the different traditions of administrative law. While these two principles are well established in European law,only in recent years have the English courts years sought to integrate them into the common law and have experienced various difficulties in doing so. This book seeks to understand the motivation behind this development, explain why the English courts have been troubled by the principles and suggest how such difficulties can be resolved. It will be of interest to all administrative lawyers, both in practice and in academe. It will also be of interest to EU lawyers, particularly those interested in EU public law.

“Hamburger argues persuasively that America has overlaid its constitutional system with a form of governance that is both alien and dangerous.” —Law and Politics Book Review While the federal government traditionally could constrain liberty only through acts of Congress and the courts, the executive branch has increasingly come to control Americans through its own administrative rules and adjudication, thus raising disturbing questions about the effect of this sort of state power on American government and society. With Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Philip Hamburger answers this question in the affirmative, offering a revisionist account of administrative law. Rather than accepting it as a novel power necessitated by modern society, he locates its origins in the medieval and early modern English tradition of royal prerogative. Then he traces resistance to administrative law from the Middle Ages to the present. Medieval parliaments periodically tried to confine the Crown to governing through regular law, but the most effective response was the seventeenth-century development of English constitutional law, which concluded that the government could rule only through the law of the land and the courts, not through administrative edicts. Although the US Constitution pursued this conclusion even more vigorously, administrative power reemerged in the Progressive and New Deal Eras. Since then, Hamburger argues, administrative law has returned American government and society to precisely the sort of consolidated or absolute power that the US Constitution—and constitutions in general—were designed to prevent. With a clear yet many-layered argument that draws on history, law, and legal thought, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? reveals administrative law to be not a benign, natural outgrowth of contemporary government but a pernicious—and profoundly unlawful—return to dangerous pre-constitutional absolutism.

Explains how administrative government maintains mutual respect among citizens, legitimates administrative government under law, and supports a realistic vision of democracy.

With the transfer of ever more tasks and competences to the European level the EU’s administration has become increasingly complex, with ‘agencification’ as the most visible sign of this differentiation. This book offers a much-needed analytical overview of the field, with the aim of improving our understanding of administration at the European level, and indeed of improving the administration itself.