Prof. Yseult Marique

(Professor of Law – University of Essex)

Yseult is a Professor at Essex Law School with expertise in comparative public law in Europe. She teaches French public law (Essex), the law of public finances and law and economics at the UC Louvain (2022-) and administrative real estate law at the ULB (2022-). She holds a PhD from Cambridge (2011) and law degrees from the Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis (Candidatures, FUSL), the Université libre de Bruxelles (Licences, ULB) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (Licenciaat notariaat, VUB). She is a research associate at the Centre de droit Public of the ULB (Belgium, 2009-) and the Centre Montesquieu d’Etudes de l’Action Publique (Belgium, 2022-). From 2016 to 2023, she was a Fellow of the Deutsches Forschungsinstitut für Öffentliche Verwaltung (Speyer).

Yseult develops her academic expertise in two main legal fields, with a keen interest for interdisciplinarity collaboration and input from history, ethics, economics/organisational theories and political philosophy.

1/ Law of public finances at all levels of governance (international, European, national, local)

In this domain, Yseult is one of the founding members of the Research Network on Public Authorities in Financial Distress (RPAFD). With Eugenio Vaccari, Laura Coordes and Geo Quinot, she is the co-author of a forthcoming book on Municipalities in Financial Distress : An Environmental, Social and Governance Critique (Edward Elgar, 2025, open access). With Eugenio Vaccari, she is co-editing a book on Local Government and the Territorial Constitution – Social Justice and Local Finances in the UK (Bristol University Press, 2026, open access).

She is editing a special issue on solidarity in times of crisis at EU level with Professor Konstadinides and Dr Küçük for the Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law. Her book Public Private Partnerships and the Law (Edward Elgar 2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Birks Prize from the Society of Legal Scholars (UK). An on-going project includes a Commentary of the EU Directive on classic procurement (with Professors Wauters and Coutron, in French, Larcier, planned publication 2026). Yseult’s approach to the law of public finances builds on her keen interest for public economic law and the allocation of scarce resources (such as money, soil, water or clean air), and she is interested in how public entities spend taxpayers’ money for the public good through big infrastructure projects (eg water infrastructures) or how they collect money in innovative ways to sustain their activities. In particular, the borderline between public finances and repression is one of the lines of inquiry she pursues both at EU and at local levels. She connects this question to the tensions that can arise in the realm of social justice, especially between enforcing public policies and an ethics of care. In addition, a reflection on the different conceptions that decision-makers of the time and space dimensions of their decisions and investments enriches her teaching and research.

2/ Comparative public law in Europe

Yseult has developed a strand of research pertaining to comparative public law in Europe thanks to her participation in a number of international projects, such as the one led by Professor della Cananea on the common core of European administrative law, by Professor Stelkens on the pan-European principles of good administration, or by Professor de la Rosa on the principles of procurement. She authored the entry on administrative courts in the Edward Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, and a chapter on administrative justice and the rule of law in the Oxford Handbook on Administrative Justice. She also co-authored an overview of comparative administrative law with Professor Eliantonio for the Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law and is contributing a chapter comparing the European Union and the Council of Europe for the third edition of Comparative Administrative Law (edited by P Lindseth et al, Edward Elgar forthcoming) with Professor Stelkens. She also co-edited a special issue of the journal REALaw on resistance to transplants in the European administrative state with Professor Slautsky.

On-going projects include the updating and expansion of the second edition of the Casebook on Texts and Materials – Judicial Review of Administrative Action (two volumes, with Prof Eliantonio – under contract with Hart, planned publication 2026), the co-edition of a book on Pan-european principles of good administration (two volumes, with Prof Stelkens – under contract with Brill, planned publication 2026), and an co-edited collection on transnational administrative law. Yseult is especially interested in differentiation processes, narratives, linguistic mapping and cognitive mindsets across legal and administrative epistemic communities. She explores these matters in specific administrative law related-topics such as principles of judicial review, procurement, effective judicial protection, ethical standards in the civil service, bias, deference, climate change and intertemporal equity.

An associate member of the International Academy of Comparative Law and the Belgian representative for the Group of Independent Experts to the Charter of Local Self-Government, (Council of Europe), Yseult is one of the co-leads of the Law and Administration strand at the European Group of Public Administration. She sits in the editorial board of REALaw and in the advisory boards of comparative and European law journals (European Public Law, Hungarian Yearbook of International Law and European Law (2020-2025), Central European Public Administration Review (CEPAR), Droit Public Comparé – Comparative Public Law, and French Yearbook of Public Law). She welcomes queries and submissions for the British Association of Comparative Law and its blog (https://british-association-comparative-law.org/) and REALaw.blog.

For a Q&A with Yseult and her passion for comparative public law, please visit [this webpage].