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. 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 to give 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 for long worked on comparative law and entertain strong relations 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 US for a long time, Giacinto della Cananea and Jean-Bernard Auby are more familiar with the UK academic world, Philippe Cossalter, whose doctoral thesis was a comparative administrative law one, is in charge of the Public Law Chair at Sarrebrück University. The ‘Mutations de l’Action Publique et du Droit Public’ Chair at Sciences Po, driven 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 set up an ‘Italian Journal of Public Law’, which serves as a model for our initiative. In order to smooth the diffusion of our Yearbook, we have decided that it would be available online.

We very much hope to receive feedbacks from our readers, in order to ensure that our project indeed has an added value and is considered useful within the community. We have been fortunate enough to be joined by two young scholars, Jasmin Hiry-Lesch and Enrico Buono, who helped us review the contributions we receive, both linguistically and on the substance. We thank them for their implication.