Shaping Inter-Legality. The Role of Administrative Law Techniques and Their Implications

This chapter explores the ways in which administrative law techniques sustain and structure inter-legality. As a process of recognition of the validity of other orders’ legality, inter-legality is shaped by a number of specific institutional and legal mechanisms, including those that are used by each legal order by sector to govern the interactions between the processes of administrative implementation of its own first-level measures and the implementing processes of other legal orders. By setting out a number of examples, ranging from military security to environmental protection, the chapter first identifies three different types of situations: (i) one in which the implementation processes of the various legal orders are regulated in such a way to support their ‘joint responsibility’; (ii) a second group in which the implementation processes promote ‘coordination of different responsibilities’; (iii) a number of cases in which the implementation processes lead to ‘conflicts of responsibilities’ (§§ 2-5). Once we recognize this diversity of situations, we can better understand inter-legality as a changing legal situation and point to the variety of problems that the operation of inter-legality may raise (§ 6). The chapter ends with some reflections on the way in which inter-legality affects and shapes the structure of the legal space in which it operates. Arguably, inter-legality is an alternative both to the representation of the world community provided by the traditional public international law model and to the main understandings elaborated by the global administrative law scholarship. Inter-legality is based on plurality and on its turn promotes plurality. What are the precise features of the pluralist space that inter-legality is promoting, it yet remains to be seen (§ 7).