Massot, Jean --- "The Powers and Duties of the French Administrative Judge" [2010] ELECD 826; in Rose-Ackerman, Susan; Lindseth, L. Peter (eds), "Comparative Administrative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Comparative Administrative Law

Editor(s): Rose-Ackerman, Susan; Lindseth, L. Peter

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848446359

Section: Chapter 24

Section Title: The Powers and Duties of the French Administrative Judge

Author(s): Massot, Jean

Number of pages: 11

Extract:

24 The powers and duties of the French
administrative judge
Jean Massot*


To explain the specificity of the `office of the administrative judge' in a country like France,
it is necessary to look both to history and to geography. History allows us to understand
how this Napoleonic creation, whose original aim was in no way the protection of the
citizen against the administration (rather, it was the protection of the latter against inter-
ference by citizens and ordinary judicial courts),1 progressively became both an extremely
powerful judge and an institution at least as independent as its judicial counterparts.
Geography helps to explain how specialized administrative courts have long since ceased
to be a specifically French or even continental European institution (they exist, in some
form, in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands). One also
finds similar judges in countries as various as the majority of francophone African states,
Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Thailand, and Colombia, to name just a few.2
There must be a reason that an independent administrative judiciary on the French
model exists in numerous democratic countries or in countries transitioning to democ-
racy. In this chapter, I will try to show that it is precisely in the way the powers and duties
of the administrative judge have developed that one finds a good deal of the justification
for the institution's existence. On the level of mission (Section 1 below), I will show that
the French system of administrative justice has all the powers ...