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Palgrave Macmillan

The Sound of Silence in European Administrative Law

  • Book
  • © 2020

Overview

  • The first book on administrative silence, tackling both the legal aspects and empirical evidence of how the legal institution works in practice
  • Develops a comparative perspective on the different legal options for dealing with administrative silence in selected European jurisdictions
  • Argues that a recent trend towards assigning administrative silence positive legal effects in administrative decision-making is controversial and it encounters resistant in practice
  • Aims to be a source of inspiration for legislators when considering modes of dealing with administrative timeliness and for practitioners and courts when interpreting and applying legislation already in place

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Table of contents (15 chapters)

  1. Introduction and Comparisons

  2. The European Union

  3. National Perspectives – Western and Southern Europe

  4. National Perspectives – Central and Eastern Europe

Keywords

About this book

This book examines administrative silence in a comparative manner in the EU law and 13 jurisdictions from Europe. Administrative silence is an issue that lies at the intersection of legal and managerial aspects of public administration, a concept that is both reflecting and testing the principles of legal certainty, legality, good administration, legitimate expectations, and effectiveness. Inactivity or excessive length of proceedings appears to be of interest for comparisons, particularly in the context of the recent attempts to develop European convergence models. The book offers in-depth insights into legal regulation, theory, case law and practice regarding positive and negative legal fictions in the selected European jurisdictions. 

Reviews

“According to traditional theories, administrative law is the law relating to the control of government power, its main goal is to protect an individual right, and the courts decide which contrasts to impose on administrative action. While this face of administrative law is relatively well known, another is less known, that of administrative inaction. Administrative law, when viewed in this way, requires a focus on promoting rights. It also requires shaping the very form of judicial intervention in another manner. ‘The Sound of Silence in the European Administrative Law’ helps to fill the gap that exists in legal literature, by way of a wide-ranging comparative approach, focusing on both national and EU laws. This is an interesting and important book, for both public law scholars and practitioners.”

Giacinto della Cananea, Professor of Administrative Law at Bocconi University, Italy

“This new book on administrative silence, edited by Dacian Dragos, Polonca Kovač, and Hanna Tolsma, is a significant development in the literature in this area. It brings together a wide range of essays on European experiences with the problem of administrative silence, which can variously be caused by a simple error in public bodies, by administrative inertia, and sometimes even by a misuse of power. The essays develop normative and empirically-grounded points about how administrative silence is—and might be—addressed, including at the difficult interface between maladministration and illegality. The comparative dimensions to this book are as deep as they are wide, and the editors have achieved something remarkable in synthesizing the contributions and suggesting what is—and is not—possible in European law. I can think of no better or more comprehensive study of administrative silence in recent years.”

Gordon Anthony, Professor of Public Law, School of Law at the Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland


Editors and Affiliations

  • Center for Good Governance Studies, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Dacian C. Dragos

  • Faculty of Public Administration, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Polonca Kovač

  • Faculty of Law, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Hanna D. Tolsma

About the editors

Dacian C. Dragos is Jean Monnet Professor of Administrative and European Law and Co-director of the Center for Good Governance Studies at the Babes Bolyai University, Romania. Since 2010 he has chaired the Law and Administration panel of the European Group of Public Administration (EGPA). His research publications include several edited books, over 40 chapters in international books, and over 50 papers in scientific journals.


Polonca Kovač, Professor at the Faculty for Public Administration, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is a steering committee member of the Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe (NISPAcee) and a co-director of the Law and Administration panel of the EGPA. She is an editor and author of numerous articles and books, editor-in-chief of the Central European Public Administration Review, and an OECD/SIGMA expert.


Hanna D. Tolsma is Assistant Professor at the Department of Constitutional Law, Administrative Law and Public Administration of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her publication mainly relates to administrative law and environmental law. She is a member of the editorial board of AB Rechtspraak Bestuursrecht and honorary judge at the District Court in the North of the Netherlands.

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