The EU Administrative Institutions, Their Law and Legal Scholarship

The chapter approaches the EU administrative institutions as catalysts of the development of administrative law of the European Union. As a chapter of the Oxford Handbook on Comparative Administrative Law, it explains the main traits of those institutions, how legal scholarship has portrayed them and how it has addressed the core aspects of their legal regimes. Furthermore, it traces the emergence and current state of EU administrative law, characterising the different roles comparative administrative law has had at different stages. 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” (Chiti, 2007) of an integrated administration constitutionally framed by general principles and fundamental rights; the limits of resorting to comparative administrative law in the context of EU integration and, briefly, the crossroads at which EU administrative law currently stands.