Teaching Global Administrative Law: A New Domain for Administrative Law?

In the last 40 years, many public functions, traditionally exercised by national authorities have been governed by global bodies and organizations. These bodies are different from the traditional International Organizations (IOs) because of their memberships, their mission, their regulatory powers, and the tools at their disposal. Their variety explains why it is necessary to use different lenses: the international law lens continues to be necessary and important, but for a more comprehensive look, we also need another lens. The administrative law lens, in particular, can help us understand how they adopt their decisions, how these public powers can be made accountable, how they enforce their decisions, how to open their procedure to participation, and how to demand transparency in their actions. In the following article, it will be showed, moving from three case studies, how the administrative law can be useful in transfer to the action of global powers the typical guarantees and principles existing at the national level in order to increase the democratic legitimacy of the Institutions, to make decision-making procedures fair and just, to strengthen rationality, proportionality and publicity of final decisions, and to build administrative and judicial review mechanisms. Administrative law probably does not solve any problem in the functioning of these regimes, but it constitutes, together with the instruments of private law, international law and constitutional law, an important key for understanding, rationalizing, and legalizing the global legal space.