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Bermann, George A. --- "A Restatement of European Administrative Law: Problems and Prospects" [2010] ELECD 838; 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 34

Section Title: A Restatement of European Administrative Law: Problems and Prospects

Author(s): Bermann, George A.

Number of pages: 11

Extract:

34 A restatement of European administrative law:
problems and prospects
George A. Bermann


The European Union is a vast regulatory enterprise (Lindseth 2006). Thanks to a mass
of both primary legislation (predicated directly on the Treaty Establishing the European
Community1 and the Treaty on European Union2) and secondary legislation (adopted
by one or more of the EU institutions via delegation through pieces of primary legisla-
tion), the EU institutions exercise an abundance of rulemaking authority. They also
enjoy, on the basis of these same normative instruments, the authority to render large
numbers of individualized decisions. This combination of rulemaking and adjudica-
tory power has enabled the European Union to become an arena of administrative law
activity as intensive as any to be found on the globe (Bermann et al. 2008a).
One of the virtues of the European Union, particularly in evidence in recent years,
has been its taste for procedural innovation and experimentation (de Búrca and Scott
2007, de Búrca and Walker 2007). However, these have come at a price. A disconnect
exists between the proliferation of procedural regimes, on the one hand, and the relative
absence of general standards of administrative procedure and its review, on the other.
As the EU law literature never fails to emphasize, at stake are the transparency and
legitimacy of EU law and the European Union itself (Joerges et al. 2004, Larsson and
Schaefer 2006: 541).
These reflections have generated a strong impulse to make sense of the administrative
procedure of the ...