What is the objective of the “French Yearbook of Public Law”?
Our objective can easily be summed up. It is to bring to the international public law forum some products of the French public law doctrine and some prominent events in the current constitutional, legislative and jurisprudential evolution of French public law. And to do so in what has become the internationally dominant language in law, including public law: English.
In the first issue, the members of the Steering Committee set out these objectives, which continue to guide the French Yearbook of Public Law. They emphasized the importance of making French public law developments accessible to a wider international audience, while fostering the participation of French scholars in global academic debates.
This has a twofold meaning: proposing to English-speaking lawyers to be at a minimum informed on where French public law is moving towards, and giving French public lawyers the possibility to participate in the international debate concerning their research field.
We took up this project as the four of us believe that our different experiences allow us to successfully achieve the set aims. The four of us have long worked on comparative law and maintain strong ties with the English-speaking international public law doctrine. We have acquired this common experience in partially different manners, though. Dominique Custos taught American law, comparative law and European law in the United States for many years; Giacinto della Cananea and Jean-Bernard Auby are more familiar with the United Kingdom academic world; Philippe Cossalter, whose doctoral thesis was in comparative administrative law, holds the Chair of Public Law at Saarbrücken University.
The ‘Mutations de l’Action Publique et du Droit Public’ Chair at Sciences Po, led by Jean-Bernard Auby, hosted a long series of ‘Global, European and Comparative Law’ seminars between 2006 and 2016. Some years ago, Giacinto della Cananea founded the Italian Journal of Public Law, which has served as a model for our initiative. In order to facilitate the dissemination of the Yearbook, we decided that it would be made available online.
We very much hope to receive feedback from our readers, in order to ensure that our project indeed has added value and is considered useful within the academic community. We have been fortunate to be joined by two young scholars, Jasmin Hiry-Lesch and Enrico Buono, who have assisted us in reviewing the contributions we receive, both linguistically and substantively. We thank them for their valuable contribution.
We hope that this second issue will once again draw the reader’s attention to current developments in French and comparative public law.
