State Procedure and Union Rights – By Johan Lindholm

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2010.00520_2.x
• Author: Carol Harlow
• Date: 01 July 2010
• Published date: 01 July 2010

eulj_520501..510

BOOK REVIEWS

Droit Administratif Européen.Edited by Jean-Bernard Auby and Jacqueline Dutheil de

la Rochère. Brussels: Bruylant, 2007. 1136 pp. Pb. €145.00.

For many years, Jürgen Schwarze’s Europäisches Verwaltungsrecht (two volumes, 1988;

2nd edition in one volume, 2005) together with its English and French translations

(European Administrative Law, 1992; Droit Administratif Européen, 1994) has domi-

nated the advanced textbook literature on European administrative law. It was only in

2006 that Paul Craig’s EU Administrative Law was issued, followed by The Europeani-

sation of Public Law by Jan Henrik Jans, Roel de Lange, Sacha Prechal and Rob

Widdershoven in 2007, and another Europäisches Verwaltungsrecht has just been pub-

lished by the German ECJ judge Thomas von Danwitz—to mention just the most

voluminous works. Together with the equally voluminous Droit Administratif Européen

under review here, edited by Jean-Bernard Auby and Jacqueline Dutheil de la Rochère,

there is now a broad range of textbooks focusing on the subject from many different

perspectives. This concentration of large textbooks shows that the subject of European

administrative law is in a phase of consolidation where the outcome of the plethora of

monographs and single articles might be brought into a systematic shape.

In this respect, Auby and Dutheil de la Rochère’s Droit Administratif Européen sees

itself as a particular representative of the doctrine française, the belatedness of which in

the European administrative law debate the editors want to overcome (p 3). Indeed,

many of the articles do adopt a view which can only be understood having some idea

of the core notions of French law, it avoids just rethinking the existing knowledge on

the subject à la française, and the quite substantive contributions from foreign (ie

non-French) authors are proof of that approach.

Although we can today be sure to have such a subject as European administrative

law, its terminology is by no means def‌initely settled. Auby and Dutheil de la

Rochère have a comprehensive concept of what the subject is—all EU law related to

the execution of law (and not its legislative production) together with its links to the

national legal systems (pp 3 et seq). Although this def‌inition is certainly not devoid

of problems (Where is the borderline between legislation and execution?—a very

French view; How far does the subject intrude into national legal systems?), it is a

starting point for an analysis of unquestionable quality. But problems of terminology

do not stop there. What is the intricate web of European and national sources, actors

and authorities to be called? Is it co-administration tout court (Jacques Ziller, p 242),

something like a ‘Verwaltungsverbund’ (a term coined in Germany mainly by Eber-

hard Schmidt-Aßmann)—maybe translated as ‘administration conjointe’or‘adminis-

tration commune’ (Claudio Franchini, p 268), is it ‘europeanisation’ or are we to deal

with an ‘espace administratif européen’ to be organised according to common prin-

ciples and rules (cf Siedentopf and Speer, pp 299 et seq, following the OECD/SIGMA

study of 1999)? These notions are used throughout the book, and as there is still no

consensus about a terminology at national level, its formation is a major task for

European scholars.

European Law Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4, July 2010, pp. 501–510.

© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA