The EU Administrative Institutions, Their Law, and Legal Scholarship

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the administrative institutions of the European Union (EU). It approaches administrative institutions as catalysts of the development of administrative law of the EU. The chapter first explains their main features, how legal scholarship has portrayed them, and how it has addressed the core aspects of their legal regimes. Next, this chapter shifts the focus to the emergence and current state of EU administrative law and of the role of comparative administrative law therein. 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’ of an integrated administration constitutionally framed by general principles and fundamental rights; as well as the functions that comparative administrative law performed in different stages of EU administrative law, its current limits, and, briefly, the current challenges of EU administrative law.