The Foundations of the Duty to Give Reasons and a Normative Reconstruction

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.