Public Procurement in Serbia as the Special Regime of Contract Law

Abstract

The administrative and civil jurisprudence in Serbia and comparative legal systems do not concur on the nature of public procurement. While the literature on administrative law posits this emerging body of law into the public administrative law, many scholars of civil law in continental law systems subsume it under traditional law of obligations. This essay examines undefined systemic connections of the Public Procurement Act (PPA) with the law of obligations in the legal system of the Republic of Serbia. It suggests that the PPA norms, although do not explicitly refer to it, belong to a new special regime of contract law, which defining trait is the public personality of a procurement entity as one of the contracting parties. Therefore, it is proposed to consider rules of administrative decision-making on the contract awarding and its execution to be a new special regime of the contract law. Also, it is proposed to limit the superior position of the procurement entity in this relationship, for the sake of the preservation of basic civil law values.