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SUMMARY
I. INTRODUCTION......................................599
II. SCOPE OF THE APPLICATION OF ADMINISTRATIVE LAW...600
III. JUDICIAL REVIEW OF ADMINISTRATIVE DECISIONS.....601
IV. ADMINISTRATIVE LAW RULES.........................602
V. FINAL REMARKS.....................................603
I. INTRODUCTION
If in the year 1900, a professor of law had been asked what administrative law would look like at the end of the century, the forecast would surely have been a complete failure.
How could anyone imagine that administrative law could grow as it did throughout the century, linked to the birth and development-and also, certainly, the crisis-of the so-- called "social state"?1 Similarly, since administrative environmental law simply did not exist then, how could our professor even conceive that the main obstacle to be overcome when building a new highway would now be the potential destruction of the natural habitat of a rare, endangered animal or plant species? Or that one of the most important administrative law debates in Europe in the last months of the year 2000 would search for the most reasonable procedure-beauty parade versus auction-for awarding Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) licences which are the licences enabling the provision of third generation mobile communication services? Or finally, that, even from a theoretical point of view, administrative law would manage to emancipate itself from private law, since we now know that the only reason why the basic legal notions (i.e., contract, property, liability) are regulated in the private law codes (mainly the Civil Codes) is because private law has gone historically far ahead of public law from a technical point of view, and not because the concepts belong by essence to the private law, and that such basic legal notions are, strictly speaking, Oberbegrie (superconcepts) belonging to the general theory of law and common to public and private law?
Technological developments, political changes, renewed awareness of forgotten interests-there are many factors that made it simply impossible in 1900 to predict what administrative law would look like in the next millenium, and that prevent us today from trying a similar exercise for the end of the twenty-first century.
My purpose here is, thus, much more modest. I would only like to highlight some of the most distinctive trends in administrative law that may be perceived already and that will probably intensify throughout the next...