This book offers a comprehensive account of the transatlantic regulatory cooperation phenomenon: its causes and political context in a globalizing economy, its theoretical understanding, its relationship to trade and competition, its implications for democracy, and its likely directions in the future. This book recognizes that, while national authorities are still the principal actors in regulatory fields, regulation is increasingly an international affair.

The implications of European integration for national democracy and constitutionalism are well known. Nevertheless, as the events of the last decade made clear, the EU's complex system of governance has been unable to achieve a democratic or constitutional legitimacy in its own right. In Power and Legitimacy: Reconciling Europe and the Nation-State, Peter L. Lindseth traces the roots of this paradox to integration's dependence on the postwar constitutional settlement of administrative governance on the national level. Supranational policymaking has relied on various forms of oversight from national constitutional bodies, following models that were first developed in the administrative state and then translated into the European context. These national oversight mechanisms (executive, legislative, and judicial) have over the last half-century developed to address the central disconnect in the integration process: between the need for supranational regulatory power, on the one hand, and the persistence of national constitutional legitimacy, on the other. In defining the ways European public law has sought to reconcile these two conflicting demands, Professor Lindseth lays the foundation for a better understanding of the "administrative, not constitutional" nature of European governance going forward.

The comparative study of administrative law has a long history dating back more than 200 years. It has enjoyed a renaissance in the past 15 years or so and now sits alongside fields such as comparative constitutional law and global administrative law as a well-established area of scholarly research. This book is the first to provide a broad and systematic view of the subject both in terms of the topics covered and the legal traditions surveyed. In its various parts it surveys the historical beginnings of comparative administrative law scholarship, discusses important methodological issues, examines the relationship between administrative law and regime type, analyses basic concepts such as 'administrative power' and 'accountability', and deals with the creation, functions, and control of administrative power, and values of administration. The final part looks to the future of this young sub-discipline. In this volume, distinguished experts and leaders in the field discuss a wide range of issues in administrative law from a comparative perspective. Administrative law is concerned with the conferral, nature, exercise, and legal control of administrative (or 'executive') governmental power. It has close links with other areas of 'public law', notably constitutional law and international law. It is of great interest and importance not only to lawyers but also to students of politics, government, and public policy. Studying public law comparatively helps to identify both similarities and differences between the way government power and its control is managed in different countries and legal traditions.