Comparative Administrative Law in the EU: The Integration Function and its Limits

This chapter identifies the integration function of comparative administrative law, as that results from early writings on the resort to comparison by the European Court of Justice and on the relevance of comparison in the foundations of EU administrative law, as set out in the influential work of Jürgen Schwarze. It stresses the interplay of courts and scholars in imbuing EU administrative law with state-based traits of EU law, the role of this development in upholding the legitimacy of EU law, the tensions it introduced and the limits of the integration function of comparative administrative law. It concludes that legal scholars should take a critical distance to the role that comparison has had in shaping our conceptions of EU administrative law, and in fashioning it a state-like manner, and query the extent to which they remain actual in the current legal context.