Global Administrative Law

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Global Administrative Law (GAL) and its approach, i.e. that global governance may be productively explained through the lens of administrative law (and domestic public law more generally), which however are not alternative to those of international law and other disciplines, but must be used in conjunction with them. Like domestic administrative law, the term GAL can refer to either a scholarly approach or methodology that academics (and others) may use to analyse various forms of global governance, or to a set of actual norms, ‘practices’, or activities or mechanisms that states, IOs and others, including private bodies, use in various forms of global governance. Such twofold dimension, as this Chapter shows, may produce some ambiguities, even in relation to GAL’s role in the putative crisis of international law. Section 1 deals with the genesis and meaning of GAL. Section 2 illustrates the relationships between GAL and its three branches of law, which are international law, international administrative law (or international institutional law), and domestic public and administrative law. Section 3 identifies GAL distinctive features. Section 4 contextualizes GAL within global regulatory regimes under four main dimensions: regulatory, (quasi-)judicial, institutional, and procedural. Section 5 deals with GAL facing the up and down of (legal) globalization, and it focuses specifically on two main problems which mark the relationships between global regulatory regimes, international law and domestic legal orders: the quest for legitimacy and accountability beyond the (democratic) state, on the one side, and the public and private distinction at international level, on the one other. Lastly, section 6 investigates the future of GAL and its scholarship, portraying its limits and opportunities.