Book Review: Rulemaking, Participation and the Limits of Public Law in the USA and Europe, Governing by Numbers
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390201100212 |
| Date | 01 June 2002 |
| Published date | 01 June 2002 |
| Author | Francesca Bignami |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BOOK REVIEWS
317
THEODORA TH. ZIAMOU, Rulemaking, Participation and the Limits of Public Law in
the USA and Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001, 270 pp., $104.95 (pbk).
EDWARD C. PAGE, Governing by Numbers. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2001, 256 pp.,
£22.50 (hbk).
In Europe, administrative procedure has become the stuff of high politics. The
Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union proclaims the right to good
administration. In response to calls from Member States, the European Union has
adopted legislation requiring the Commission to make information about regulatory
proceedings readily available to the public. Tony Blair’s Labour Party rose to power
on a platform that included legislation on access to government information, a cam-
paign promise that finally materialized in 2000. In doing so, the United Kingdom fol-
lowed the example of a number of European countries that had already adopted
freedom of information legislation, starting with France in 1978.
It is said that greater openness, fairness, public participation and devolution are
responses to the dwindling legitimacy of European administration, both in Brussels
and in national capitals. To get beyond alarmist statements of legitimacy crisis and
empty promises of opennesss and access, however, rigorous scholarship is needed to
explore the extent of the problem with administration in Europe and whether any of
the solutions proposed will indeed improve matters. The two books under review do
some of the hard work.
Rulemaking, Participation and the Limits of Public Law in the USA and Europe is
a welcome contribution to the comparative literature on public law. As the title indi-
cates; the focus is rulemaking, that is, the process by which the public administration
determines the future rights and liabilities of a class of individuals or firms, generally
pursuant to statutory instructions. Rulemaking is one of the major sources of con-
fusion in comparative administrative law, mainly because in some places, including
Europe, it is left entirely to the interaction of legislative and executive politics and in
other places, namely the United States, it is highly regulated by the...
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