Suchergebnisse

The limited scope of participation in the making of EU law remains a continued source of controversy, and high on the agenda for institutional reform. This book assesses the scope of legal rights to participate in EU rulemaking, criticising their limited application by the European courts, and presenting a legal argument for their extension.

The controversy over the degree of judicial review of monetary policy decisions triggered by the contrasting Weiss judgments of the German Federal Constitutional Court and of the Court of Justice of the European Union invites an inquiry into the role of law in areas characterized by a high degree of political and technical complexity. This article singles out the structural conditions that qualify complexity in specific instances of decision-making: prognostic assessments, goal-oriented decisions, marked by uncertainty, legal indeterminacy, and discretion. These traits characterize both monetary policy decisions and some regulatory decisions taken within the banking union, such as the setting of minimum requirements for own funds and eligible liabilities (MREL) and the calculation of the leverage ratios of credit institutions (Livret A judgments). Irrespective of the very distinct formal-institutional legal frameworks of these two policy fields, in those conditions legality may be determined by the discretionary choices of the decision-maker. For this reason, they impact the court's deployment of legal principles, namely proportionality and careful and impartial examination. This cross-sector comparison sheds light on the relative specificity of monetary policy, and leads to rejecting the transposition of a distinction between "high politics" and "ordinary administration" to EU law, as a means of both explaining and guiding different degrees of judicial review in conditions of complexity. The different constitutional relevance of monetary policy decisions and of "ordinary" banking supervision requires not a distinction that can rationalize judicial review, but a full consideration of the role that the law must have in supporting non-judicial accountability.
judicial review of administrative discretion, complex technical and economic assessments, monetary policy, proportionality, banking union, principle of careful and impartial examination

The chapter approaches the EU administrative institutions as catalysts of the development of administrative law of the European Union. As a chapter of the Oxford Handbook on Comparative Administrative Law, it explains the main traits of those institutions, how legal scholarship has portrayed them and how it has addressed the core aspects of their legal regimes. Furthermore, it traces the emergence and current state of EU administrative law, characterising the different roles comparative administrative law has had at different stages. It highlights the initial dissonance between the specificities of the EU administrative institutions and the state-matrix of general principles that were developed on the basis of functional comparison; the role of legal scholarship in shaping EU administrative law, in its efforts to give effect to an "utopia" (Chiti, 2007) of an integrated administration constitutionally framed by general principles and fundamental rights; the limits of resorting to comparative administrative law in the context of EU integration and, briefly, the crossroads at which EU administrative law currently stands.

Despite operating in highly constrained legal environments, executive actors may act in a constitutive capacity. This observation prompts a critical assessment of the role of procedural principles in EU administrative law. As norms of conduct deployed by executive bodies during the process of norm concretization, procedural principles may have legal dimensions that, while constitutionally relevant, may not come to the fore in judicial review. The chapter develops this argument with regard to the multifaceted character of the duty to give reasons. It argues that, as a norm of conduct, the duty to give reasons ought to ensure the constitutional embeddedness of the constitutive action of EU executive bodies. Such role is consistent both with the original relevance of the duty to give reasons to the law of integration (in the context of the European Coal and Steel Community) and with the current EU constitutional framework. The latter justifies reinstituting the original constitutional function of the duty to give reasons, irrespective of its current scope in the context of judicial review.

The legal status of binding and non-binding international decisions adopted by global regulatory bodies in EU law, their authority (as acknowledged in the case law of the CJEU) and legal effects allow one to characterise them as the external administrative layer of EU law-making. Mega-regional agreements, of which the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is an instance, have the potential to expand this tier of aw. This article maps the substantive legal effects of international decisions in EU law as expounded by the CJEU, arguing that the case law the Court developed is transposable to future decisions of CETA bodies. Furthermore, it contrasts their possible substantive impact in EU law with the weaknesses of procedural controls over the exercise of public authority by those bodies.

Recent high profile judgments of the European Court of Justice (ESMA and Gauweiler) have endorsed the expansion of the EU's executive powers, including those of its administration. Once such powers are attributed or judicially endorsed, how far may law reach in structuring the exercise of discretion by EU administrative actors? The article analyses the way the EU courts have reviewed administrative discretion in instances where they have performed a close scrutiny thereof. It argues that the EU courts downplayed the role law ought to have in structuring the exercise of administrative discretion, by overlooking the public interests that ought to be pursued by force of legal norms. By contrast, the control of discretion by the European Ombudsman illustrates a different and normatively more demanding understanding of how law may operate in relation to discretion.

Regulatory cooperation is a core aspect of mega-regional agreements in liberalizing trade and investment, as it enables the parties to bridge their regulatory divergences beyond what is defined in the text of the agreements. It relies on institutional and procedural structures that entail both the mutual adjustment of domestic procedures of the parties and new international fora where regulators meet to negotiate and deliberate. In the case of TTIP, regulatory cooperation will be the setting in which decisions will be prepared or made on the differences between EU and US regulation that could be usefully overcome; on the technical requirements that are unnecessarily duplicated; on the standards that should remain in place because they contend with public policy objectives in a way that would not be compatible with domestic standards; on the areas that are too distinct to justify attempts at mutual recognition or other forms of regulatory compatibility; on the standards that both parties will promote globally. This paper focuses on participation, which in addition to information exchanges and regulatory impact assessments, forms part of the trio of "good regulatory practices" that constitute the procedural basis of regulatory cooperation under TTIP. ; Version of 1 June 2016

Recent high profile judgments of the European Court of Justice (ESMA and Gauweiler) have endorsed the expansion of the EU's executive powers, including those of its administration. Once such powers are attributed or judicially endorsed, how far may law reach in structuring the exercise of discretion by EU administrative actors? The article analyses the way the EU courts have reviewed administrative discretion in instances where they have performed a close scrutiny thereof. It argues that the EU courts downplayed the role law ought to have in structuring the exercise of administrative discretion, by overlooking the public interests that ought to be pursued by force of legal norms. By contrast, the control of discretion by the European Ombudsman illustrates a different and normatively more demanding understanding of how law may operate in relation to discretion.

The relative power of the Commission, the Parliament and the Council in the adoption of delegated and implementing acts, including the debate on the delimitation of the scope of these acts, has dominated the debate on the scheme of non-legislative acts introduced by the Lisbon Treaty. This chapter argues that approaching decision-making procedures of delegated and implementing acts only from an institutional lens is normatively insufficient, in two respects. First, it is incongruous with the Treaty provisions on democracy: not only an inter-institutional perspective is insufficient to ensure the democratic legitimacy of delegated and implementing acts, but also it ignores the relationships between the makers of legal acts and the outer sphere composed of citizens and legally affected persons. Secondly, it also overlooks core functions of procedures that are relevant to ensure the legitimacy of public acts. Procedures are a means to rationalise public action, by channeling information, weighing competing interests, and allowing scrutiny of the choices made. If designed accordingly, procedures could concretise democracy as a Union founding principle also in the making of delegated and implementing acts.