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Custos, Dominique --- "Independent Administrative Authorities in France: Structural and Procedural Change at the Intersection of Americanization, Europeanization and Gallicization" [2010] ELECD 819; in Rose-Ackerman, Susan; Lindseth, L. Peter (eds), "Comparative Administrative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Comparative Administrative Law

Editor(s): Rose-Ackerman, Susan; Lindseth, L. Peter

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848446359

Section: Chapter 17

Section Title: Independent Administrative Authorities in France: Structural and Procedural Change at the Intersection of Americanization, Europeanization and Gallicization

Author(s): Custos, Dominique

Number of pages: 16

Extract:

17 Independent administrative authorities in France:
structural and procedural change at the
intersection of Americanization, Europeanization
and Gallicization
Dominique Custos


Over the past twenty years, the French administrative sphere has experienced dramatic
structural changes, some inspired by American examples, others prodded by the EU
or the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) (Sauvé 2008: 239). On the one
hand, since the late 1980s and early 1990s, French public utilities have undergone a
liberalization that first affected air transport and telecommunications, then the electric-
ity and gas sectors, eventually reaching postal and railroad services. The restructuring
of state-owned companies in the 1980s generally resulted only in the shrinking of the
public sector and an influx of private law rules into the operation of some public cor-
porations. The 1990s liberalization, by contrast, had more far-reaching consequences.
The new regulatory framework, imposed by EU directives or rulings by its judicial arm,
the European Court of Justice (ECJ), gave a central role to independent administrative
authorities (IAAs) in French administration and regulation. In this regard, the emerging
regulatory framework bears a striking resemblance to the revised common carrier model
that emerged in the United States following the deregulation of public utilities in the late
1970s.
These various changes have forced former publicly owned monopolies into a com-
petitive environment. As a consequence, a fundamental transformation has taken hold,
which arguably upsets the core of the French administrative foundations: the ideal of
service public or public service. Moreover, starting in the 1990s, ...