"This book looks into the Treaty-law framework governing the delegation of legislative power in the EU as redefined by the Lisbon Treaty. It asks how this empowered Parliament operates, both in in relation to decision-making at the legislative level, looking at specific case studies, and the sub-legislative level, examining its scrutiny powers. By doing so, it illustrates if the Parliament's formally reinforced role is reflected in the actual balance of powers in the area of delegated legislation. This rigorous study gives a fascinating insight into one of the most significant developments in European parliamentary law-making, which EU constitutional lawyers will find required reading."--

This book is the outcome of a research seminar with the title of `Delegation of Legislative Powers in the European Community: the Role of Committees' that was held in London on 16 and 17 January 1998. The seminar brought together academics from political and legal science in different countries of the European Community in order to provide as diverse as possible a set of perspectives on the topic. Some of the chapters of the book are based on papers delivered in the seminar. The first part of the book is primarily devoted to a political science perspective on comitology and provides a general theoretical framework. The second part is concerned with a normative analysis in a legal tradition of the issue of delegation of legislative powers. The aim here is to explore to what extent the national concepts and institutes of delegation of powers can contribute to a better understanding of the Community concept of delegation. The third part of the book concerns the institutional perspective and deals with the history of comitology and the role of the Court of Justice in the development of the system. The fourth and final part of the book examines various areas of EC law, including environmental law, product safety and other areas.

With each legislative issue, legislators have to decide whether to delegate decision-making to the executive and/or to expert bodies in order to flesh out the details of this legislation, or, alternatively, to spell out all aspects of this decision in legislation proper. The reasons why to delegate have been of prime interest to political science. The debate has concentrated on principal-agent theory to explain why politicians delegate decision-making to bureaucrats, to independent regulatory agencies, and to others actors and how to control these agents. By contrast, Changing Rules of Delegation focuses on these questions: Which actors are empowered by delegation? Are executive actors empowered over legislative actors? How do legislative actors react to the loss of power? What opportunities are there to change the institutional rules governing delegation in order to (re)gain institutional power and, with it influence over policy outcomes? The authors analyze the conditions and processes of change of the rules that delegate decision-making power to the Commission's implementing powers under comitology. Focusing on the role of the European Parliament the authors explain why the Commission, the Council, and increasingly the Parliament, delegated decision-making to the Commission. If they chose delegation, they still have to determine under which institutional rule comitology should operate. These rules, too, distribute power unequally among actors and therefore raise the question of how they came about in the first place and whether and how the "losers" of a rule change seek to alter the rules at a later point in time.

Examining the constitutional and procedural arrangements that enable the European Commission to adopt general and legally binding rules, this book explores how the system works in practice, subsequent to the sweeping reforms recently implemented.

Every year the EU Commission issues thousands of rules based on powers delegated by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. But delegation is carefully controlled. Traditionally, control has been exerted through a system of committees of member state representatives ('comitology'). However, this system was contested by the European Parliament which was left without any influence. The Lisbon Treaty introduced a new control regime for delegated powers, the so-called delegated acts system, which was meant to supplement the existing system. The new system involves direct control by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament and thus for the first time gave the European Parliament real influence over delegated powers. However, the choice over which delegation regime to use in practice has turned into one of the most vehement institutional conflicts in the EU political system. This book represents the first comprehensive investigation of this conflict. It does so by a combination of methods and data, including process-tracing of the introduction of the new system in the Lisbon Treaty, case studies of selected post-Lisbon delegation situations, and statistical analysis of datasets comprising hundreds of post-Lisbon legislative files.

A notable trend in recent scholarship on the nature of the European Union and its democratic legitimacy focuses on the concept of `legislation and its employment within the European Community's legal system. In this remarkable work of synthesis, Alexander Tandürk exposes and elucidates the underlying uncertainty as to the meaning of the term, and even its legitimate use, within the Community's legal order. He arrives at a clear evaluation of the extent to which the concept of legislation can be applied in the EC through a comparative analysis of the British, French, and German constitutional systems, and proceeds to reveal and highlight aspects of the concept of legislation derived from this analysis appearing in areas of EC law. A number of crucially significant insights emerge, among them the following: the distinction between `legislation in form' and `legislation in substance'; defining the addressee of Community acts; judicial determination of the general application of an act; the relevance of the EU's system of functional (rather than personal) representation; and the co-decision and assent procedures of the EU institutions as `legislation in form. All those interested in the nature of the EC legal system and the state of its development will find this study richly rewarding. Building rigorously on detailed analysis of EC case law and on prior scholarship, the book shows the way to a new understanding of the relevance of the concept of legislation to the solution of some of the EU's most pressing legal issues.

This book first provides a critical analysis of the legal framework that governs the delegation of rulemaking powers to the European Commission. Second, it explores how the framework that governs such a delegation of powers to the Commission operates in the food and health policy domain.