Four years ago, on the Blog Chemins publics, I hailed the arrival of a ‘springtime of comparative administrative law’ (Le printemps du droit administratif comparé ; an English translation is available here): the publication, in the previous decade, of a large number of works on this topic. The flow has not dried up. The main reason is that the interpenetration of our systems, at world level and even more so at European level, produces a natural confrontation between administrative systems, which sometimes – depending on the questions, but this is also more or less obvious to the various analysts – brings them together around common axes.

I would like to summarise what I have personally drawn from this flow of publications since 2021.

1°.  In its own right, ‘Theorising Comparative Public Law. A Reader from Germany’ edited by Armin von Bogdandy and Eberhard Schmidt-Assmann (Nomos, 2024), which brings together, under two prestigious editors, fifteen German contributions reflecting on the theories of comparative constitutional law and comparative administrative law.

Three of them are specifically devoted to administrative law. In the first (‘The Germanic Tradition of Comparative Administrative Law’), Karl-Peter Sommermann shows how interest in comparative administrative law emerged during the Enlightenment: ‘It was then that rationalism and, later, legal positivism gave rise to the first forms of “universalist” and “culturalist” approaches to legal comparison’. In the second (‘Comparative Administrative Law: Particularities, Methodologies, and History’), Christoph Schönberger argues that, despite the evidence of long-standing influences between administrative laws, German administrative law has long remained dominated by the idea of national singularities. He also offers an interesting analysis of the methodology of comparative administrative law. In the third (‘Comparative Administrative Law: Concepts and Topics’), Eberhard Schmidt-Aßmann, after observing that national variations in the field of administrative law make it necessary to adopt as broad a definition as possible when making comparisons, points out in particular that compared with other areas of comparative law, comparative administrative law stands out because of its connection with certain institutions and its orientation towards the production of standards.

2°. Special mention must be made of the impressive series of works edited by Giacinto della Cananea as part of the project ‘The Common Core of European Administrative Laws’ (COCEAL). The first stages of this project were mentioned in my post of 2021, but a number of important stones have since been added to the edifice.

On the one hand, the various segments of the comparative research carried out as part of the COCEAL project have now been published, or will soon be, in the following seven books, all published by Oxford University Press, in the series ‘The Common Core of European Administrative Laws’,

– “Tort Liability of Public Authorities in European Laws” (edition: Giacinto della Cananea and Roberto Caranta) 2020 (already mentioned in my piece in 2021)

– « Administrative Justice Fin de Siècle. Early Judicial Standards of Administrative Conduct in Europe (1880-1910) » (edition: Giacinto della Cananea and Stefano Mannoni) 2021

– “Judicial Review of Administration in Europe” (edition: Giacinto della Cananea and Mads Andenas), 2021

– “Procedural Requirements for Administrative Limits to Property Rights” (edition: Martina Conticelli and Thomas Perroud), 2022

– “The Austrian Codification of Administrative Procedure. Diffusion and oblivion (1920-1970)”, (edition: Giacinto della Cananea, Angela Ferrari Zumbini and Otto Pfersmann, 2023

– “General Principles and Sector-Specific Rules in European Administrative Laws” (edition: Giacinto della Cananea and Jean-Bernard Auby), 2024

– “Administrative Rulemaking and Planning in European Laws” (edition: Giacinto della Cananea and Angela Ferrari Zumbini ), forthcoming

In 2023, the principal investigator of this research published a book which describes the purpose and method of the research and summarises the main findings at the time: Giacinto della Cananea, ‘The Common Core of European Administrative Laws. Retrospective and Prospective’ (Brill/Nijhoff, 2023). He points out that the COCEAL project focuses on administrative procedure. He describes the method, which is largely based on case studies, each of which is submitted to a range of analysts from the national systems being compared. He shows that the work carried out reveals the existence of a ‘common core’ of European administrative law, where a number of general principles meet: transparency, due process, etc.

3°. The science of comparative administrative law is obviously also nourished by works which provide us with knowledge of the essential aspects of the foreign systems in which we are particularly interested (strictly speaking, these works are not comparative law, but foreign law: but this distinction is not of great interest because, in order to compare, one must have some knowledge of foreign law). In this respect, two important books seem to me to be particularly noteworthy.

The first is Anne Jacquemet-Gauché’s indispensable work on “Droit administratif allemand” (PUF, 2022). After a brief history, she describes ‘the main concepts’, followed by ‘public institutions’, procedure (non-contentious and contentious), ‘the elusive public service’, police law and civil service law.

The second is Paul Craig’s astonishing new contribution to demonstrating the errors of the Dicey doctrine denying the existence of an administrative law in Great Britain. In ‘English Administrative Law from 1550’ (Oxford University Press, 2024), he establishes that the first elements of this law were in fact present as early as the Renaissance …

4°. Some studies have the advantage of looking at major administrative law issues from an angle that links them to constitutional aspects, or even to the political balance of the systems concerned. This type of ‘wide angle’ is often very valuable in helping us to avoid confining our vision of administrative law to technical positivism.

In her latest book (‘Democracy and Executive Power. Policymaking, Accountability in the US, the UK, Germany and France’, Yale University Press, 2021, for a comment on this book see here), Susan Rose-Ackerman analyses the level of accountability – in other words, the democratic framework – within which government policies are developed and implemented in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France. In particular, she looks at the degree and methods of democratic participation adopted by the four systems,and puts forward a number of proposals on how to improve the level of accountability of the executive.

In a rather original work, Law and Leviathan – Redeeming the Administrative State (The Belknar Press, Harvard University Press, 2020), Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule look at what they analyse as the morality of administrative law: the concept is borrowed from a famous work by Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law (Yale University Press, 1964). For them, the particular morality of administrative law is made up of various principles applicable to administrative agencies (the basic organic concept of American administrative law, as we know), for example: the obligation for an agency to comply with its own rules, the strict limitation of retroactive measures, the conformity of agency policies with the particular rules governing the sector for which they are responsible, etc.

In ‘Administrative Law on an Illiberal and Post-Democratic Context’ (Springer 2024, for a presentation of this work on this blog please click here), Susana Tavares da Silva provides a useful analysis of what happens to administrative law when it is confronted with an ‘illiberal’ change in the institutional and political context in which it is placed: this is due in particular to the strengthening of government powers, the abuse of emergency legislation and attacks on the separation of powers.

5°. Another type of contribution to the progress of comparative administrative law comes from works which compare a variable number of administrative laws around major ‘classic’ questions, which necessarily occupy a strategic place within them.

Such is the collective work on public power (“La potestad administrativa. Concepto y alcance de un criterio clave por la aplicación del derecho administrativo’, Tirant Lo Blanch, 2021), edited by Eduardo Gamero Casado. This work shows that the concept plays a significant role in the definition of administrative law everywhere, even if the way in which it is understood is not uniform: if only because certain doctrines only associate it with the authoritarian aspect of this law, while others see it more readily as another word for public intervention.

Over the last twenty years or so, comparative administrative law analysis has shown an undiminished interest in administrative procedure. This is illustrated by “Comparative Concepts of Administrative Procedure. Between Legalism and Pragmatism’ (Wolters Kluwers, 2023) edited by Zbigniew Kmieciak, in which the contributions are organised around questions such as:

– “what are the characteristics of national participatory procedures?

– where is the boundary between pragmatism and legalism of administrative procedures, for example in the case of urgent or simplified, automated and mass procedures?

– does the increasing complexity of social life necessitate new solutions to integrate standards of the Rule of Law (traditional procedural values) with requirements of procedural pragmatism and efficiency?”…

6°. Naturally, the current literature on comparative administrative law is also peppered with works on specific, more ‘technical’ areas of this law. Here are a few examples.

The law of public contracts, which has become a recurrent subject of comparative analysis in recent decades, continues to be explored: for example, in the ‘Tratado de derecho public comparado. Contratos publicos’ (Fundacion Editorial Jurídica Venezolana, 2021), edited by Jaime Rodriguez-Arana Munoz and Jose Antonio Morena Molina, as well as in ’Les príncipes des contrats publics en Europe. Principles of Public Contracts in Europe’ (Bruylant, coll. “Droit administratif/ Administrative Law”, 2022), edited by Stéphane de La Rosa and Patricia Valcarcel.

In the field of comparative civil service law, mention ought to be made of the monumental ‘The Civil Service in Europe. A Research Companion’ (Routledge, 2025 in open access), edited by Karl-Peter Sommermann, Adam Krzywoń and Cristina Fraenkel-Haeberle. A range of contributors representing some fifteen European systems offer analyses of the history, concepts, Europeanisation of the civil service and current transformations of the civil service, etc.

One book looks at the specific but quite strategic issue of the amount of powers that can be devolved to independent administrative authorities: ‘Outsourcing Rulemaking powers. Constitutional Limits and National Safeguards’, by Cedric Jenart (Oxford University Press, 2022, for a presentation of the book from two different perspectives click here and here).

7°. We should welcome the fact that administrative law journals are showing a growing – albeit perhaps insufficient – interest in comparative law. This is illustrated by the regular columns in the Revue française de droit administratif (edited by Yves Gaudemet and Anne Jacquemet-Gauché) and Droit Administratif (in particular Philippe Cossalter’s column on German administrative law).

8°. Current publications give us the opportunity to pay tribute to colleagues to whom comparative administrative law owes a great deal. Michel Fromont has published the 9th edition of his emblematic ‘Grands systèmes de droit étranger’, with the help of Thomas Perroud (Dalloz, 2023). Contributions from all over Europe reflect the contribution of Jacques Ziller, a European scholar(European University Institute, 2022, edited by Diane Fromage).  As for Sabino Cassese, in his ‘Varcare le frontiere. Una autobiografia intellettuale’ (Mondadori, 2024), he reveals a few secrets about his extraordinary career as an international lawyer, minister and constitutional judge.

Posted by Jean-Bernard Auby (Emeritus Professor Sciences Po Paris).

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This blog piece is a translation of a piece published in French on Chemins publics. The original piece can be found by clicking here.