The administrative power of private bodies is a legal notion referring to the capacity of a few French institutions ruled by private law to perform special administrative police functions. This legal concept is the core of my PhD research and it results from a historical analysis.
Indeed, in France, administrative activities have been undertaken by private bodies for a very long time, but this has been overshadowed.
This paradox can be explained by the way the French State and its administration were built and by the originality of the French economic model, in which liberalism and interventionism coexist. The activities that cannot be delegated have never been clearly delimited. But according to the judicial case law, some missions strictly and naturally fall within the competence of the State. Thus, scholars traditionally consider that those sovereign matters of the State are police, justice, and taxation.
This historical analysis prompted me to propose a legal concept of administrative power of private bodies to rethink the role of private bodies within administrative functions. My PhD focused on case law and academic debates to determine the legal difficulties and inconsistencies amongst legal situations where private bodies undertake administrative activities.
My way of building a legal concept of administrative power of private bodies was to study the abnormalities and malfunctioning of some private bodies in the French administrative law landscape. This method revealed an original and autonomous legal notion of the administrative power of professional bodies, sports federations, market undertakings, private regulators for advertising, copyright collective management bodies and land development and rural settlement companies.
