Opportunity – researching administrative procedures and guidelines

Expressions of interest are sought from experts in administrative law to gather data for the Protego (Procedural Tools for Effective Governance) project, which is an advanced project funded by the European Research Council – more on the project and team is available here.

The commission is a temporary assignment that requires technical expertise in one or more of the following domains and administrative procedures across one or more of the EU 28 countries:

1. General principles of administrative action, in particular: public bodies’ obligations about transparency and giving reasons in rulemaking
2. Notice and comment procedures (often found in formal consultation guidance and obligations to notify the inception of rulemaking)
3. Public bodies’ obligations to release information (reference legal text: Freedom of Information Act)
4. Impact Assessment (reference legal texts: governmental guidelines to draft Impact Assessment)
5. Ombudsman (reference legal texts: Ombudsman regulations and statutes)
6. Judicial review of administrative acts (often found in texts of court procedures or within Administrative Procedure Acts)

Details of the work

Linguistic and country-specific knowledge of the legal framework is a prerequisite in order to be able to work on the original text and not on translations.

Participants will be asked to analyse systematically the text of the laws/acts/regulations/guidelines in one or more of the areas noted above through a simple protocol developed by the Protego team. Most of this protocol involves identifying (and translating when the text is not in English) the precise provisions of the laws.

The assignment can be carried out remotely (though the research team will be able to communicate via Skype). Moreover, no specialised software is required. The team will be able to advise on any queries regarding the protocol via Skype or email.

Remuneration will be based on the number of tasks undertaken and qualifications.

To apply

If you are interested in this taking part in this project and collaborating with us, please send a maximum 2-page CV and your expression of interest to Protego@exeter.ac.uk no later than Friday 23rd March 2018.

In the email, please indicate in what instruments and countries (of EU 28) and languages you have relevant knowledge and which are the pertinent legal texts for the administrative procedure(s) and country (-ies) of your choice.

The team particularly welcomes expressions of interest from experts who can cover more than one procedure and / or more than one country.

If you have any queries, please contact the team at Protego@exeter.ac.uk.