À la recherche du fonds commun des droits administratifs européens

In this essay we present framework, methodology and goals of a research project that aims to compare European administrative laws. The paper is divided into three parts. First, we will explain why well-known difficulties in applying traditional comparative law methods become more acute in the field of administrative law and therefore call for the development of a properly attuned methodology. We will therefore briefly dwell upon the so-called factual approach, which is successfully applied to the study of comparative private law, and will explain how this approach can be adapted to the domain of administrative law. In the second part, we will analyze the main features characterizing our project on European administrative laws. These features can be summarized as follows: the goal of our project is not harmonizing European administrative laws, but rather getting more knowledge about them; our project focuses on the administrative process rather than on the judicial review of administrative action; the methodology applied in this project combines synchronic with diachronic comparison, emphasizing the significance of history in determining contemporary legal rules and institutions; the project does not only look at national jurisdictions, but also includes the European Union as one of the legal systems worthy of scientific attention. The third and final part of the paper will discuss some of the obstacles we encountered during the research and the solutions we devised to overcome them.