THE STATUS OF COMPARATIVE ADMINISTRATIVE LAW: A COMPARISON BETWEEN FRENCH AND BELGIAN LEGAL EDUCATION
Résumé
Administrative law is a legal field usually famous for its close links with specific historic features of domestic legal systems. However, states increasingly cooperate on a range of pressing issues (e.g. immigration, cybercrime, international corruption, etc.) relying heavily on administrative cooperation. Equally, lawyers are increasingly mobile, changing jobs and countries over the course of their career. These combined evolutions should encourage to revisit how legal education provides young lawyers with tools to facilitate their critical skills. This paper shows that comparative administrative law remains very much an untapped resource to provide these skills. It offers a survey (using a questionnaire) of French and Belgian private/public universities and administrative courts. This empirical methodology is supported by historical and theoretical analysis of the past, present and future of comparative administrative law. Belgian and French legal education includes modules entitled “comparative administrative law” in the academic curriculum. They also develop other tools such as double degrees (“bi-licence” and “bi-maîtrise”) for their students to gain a better understanding of another administrative law system. Beyond these similarities, France and Belgian legal education have their specificities. For instance, Belgian administrative law is often taught from a comparative law perspective which is not necessary the case in France. Whereas Belgian administrative judges develop strategies to learn from the Netherlands, their neighbor, in their daily work a comparative approach, it was rarely the case for the French Conseil d’Etat until the recent set up of an expert unit in comparative law (Cellule de droit comparé). All in all, and although such tools are still few, this paper highlights the diversity of ways in which students are encouraged to become more familiar with foreign legal systems