About us
NOVA PEARL is a knowledge centre of NOVA School of Law’s Research Centre, CEDIS.
NOVA PEARL is devoted to the study of Regulatory Administrative Law. It adopts a broad understanding of Regulatory Administrative Law, broadly understood as the organisational, procedural, and remedial aspects of administrative protection of public interests in a market economy.
NOVA PEARL’s priority research area in the coming years lies in the administrative regulation of the digital sector.
NOVA PEARL’s activities aim to facilitate three distinct dialogues that are crucial to understand administrative regulation, namely:
Between the national and the European perspective:
NOVA PEARL is a bilingual Portuguese and European centre. It contributes to debates at national and European level, with the awareness that many challenges posed by regulatory administrative action in all Member States – not only Portugal – arise from the influence of Union legislation and case law.
Between the generalist’s and the sectoral perspective
Regulation raises issues that need to be contextualised within core doctrines of constitutional, European, and administrative law. However, it is only by cross-sectoral analysis that one may detect patterns of legal problems that appear across policy areas.
Between the academic and the practical perspective
It is in the everyday work of regulators, regulated industries, courts, and civil society that the most complex legal problems of administrative regulation appear. Legal scholarship must contribute to analysing and solving them.
Our broader approach can be summarized in these three principles, which are developed further and argued for in a recent Editorial published by Professor Filipe Brito Bastos in the Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law. The Editorial, titled ‘Regulatory administrative law and the Digital Era: The case for a pluralistic research agenda’, can be accessed here.
Activities
NOVA PEARL carries out its activities through a variety of initiatives, all thought out as different ways to contribute to the fields of European administrative and regulatory law, as explained in our Mission and Objectives.
Research
NOVA PEARL aims to function precisely was what its name states – as a platform for the exchange of ideas in the broader field of European administrative and regulatory law.
Our primary goal is to foster such an exchange across borders, policy sectors and academic traditions, be it by hosting internal workshops and our annual conference, or regularly contributing to international conferences and leading academic journals.
PEARL Talks
Aimed at the general public, this webinar series proposes to discuss key aspects and current challenges of Regulatory Administrative Law at the EU and National level.
Its typical format consists of a one-hour session where a speaker gives a presentation, followed by comments from two discussants.
One of these discussants will generally be an undergraduate or a master’s student from NOVA School of Law. This choice stems from the confidence we have in the potential of our student community, which from an early stage proves to be capable of discussing highly complex legal issues with relevance and rigor.
PEARL Reads
Created with the students of NOVA School of Law in mind, PEARL Reads is a reading group in which students are challenged to analyse and debate advanced and state of the art scholarship at the intersection of European Administrative Law, Regulatory Administrative Law, and European Union Law more generally.
This discussion is intended to take place in an informal and welcoming environment, where each participant can share their ideas without pressure or fear of speaking up, contributing at their own pace throughout the sessions.
If you are a student at NOVA School of Law and you are interested in PEARL Reads, you can e-mail us so we contact you as soon as applications are open once again.
Education and Training
More information soon