Book Review: Alternative Dispute Resolution in European Administrative Law
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663917704734b |
| Author | Richard Kirkham |
| Published date | 01 April 2017 |
| Date | 01 April 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
References
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DACIAN DRAGOS and BOGDANA NEAMTU (eds), Alternative Dispute Resolution
in European Administrative Law. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2014, p. 605,
ISBN 9783642349461, £153.00 (hbk).
There is much to commend in the edited collection, Alternative Dispute Resolution in
European Administrative Law, which represents an important contribution to a field of
law that remains under-researched in most countries in Europe. By assimilating in one
volume so many discrete studies, Alternative Dispute Resolution in European Adminis-
trative Law, will serve as a useful starting point for scholars in the field for some time.
More than that, it is to be hoped that the book, and the ongoing network of scholars from
which it derives,
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will act as a growth engine for enhanced research attention to be given
to the topic of administrative justice across Europe.
There are a number of choices that can be made in designing an edited collection, with
a major challenge being the need to retain a sense of continuity throughout the book. The
risks of incoherency are heightened with comparative studies which offer great potential
for individualized country-specific narratives being provided in the absence of clear
overriding themes. The contributors to this book, and in particular the editors Dacian
Dragos and Bogdana Neamtu, should be applauded for largely avoiding this pitfall. In
particular, the narrative of the book is framed by constructing a methodologically uni-
form framework for the comparative study. This methodological endeavour, by itself, is
an impressive contribution to knowledge.
The book is comprised of 15 separate country-specific studies, plus a chapter on the EU. The
book is then bookended by a short introductory chapter and three chapters that bring together the
key themes of the book according to each of the discrete areas of ADR mechanism chosen for
scrutiny in the book: administrative appeals, ombudsman schemes and mediation. As with most
edited collections, there is some variability in the degree of rigour applied and the readability of
the individual chapters, but for anyone unfamiliar with the sheer diversity of approaches
to ADR in the EU, this book is rich in knowledge. Further, much of the debate about the
implications of this diversity is well captured in the closing thematic chapters of the book.
However, becausethe ambition of the project was so timely andrich in potential, in the
spirit of taking the academic enterprise forward, in the remainder of this review, some of
280 Social & Legal Studies 26(2)
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