Abstract EN:

Wether they are simply put in by the litigants or examined and sustained or not by the court (we shall concern ourselves with the latter sense only), all pleas of nonadmissibility amount to refusing to discuss the substance of the case. Investigating them involves examining the general influence of formal procedures on administrative actions. Both at the level of established law, proceeding from the statute book and the holding of the Conseil d'Etat (part one), and at that of jurisprudential practices in first instance courts such as Lille's tribunal administratif (1977-1981) (part two), Analytical investigation of pleas in bar reveals an obvious duality between formality and flexibility. Formality is to be found mainly in the assertion of the specific aspect of rules in administrative litigation as a matter of principle, whereas flexibility prevails when it comes to putting them into practice. In fact, behindt such apparent contradiction stands a permanent feature in the matter of admissibility: the court's lasting freedon of appraisal. In that sense, one can speak of a gradual shift in administrative litigation towards equitable justice, inasmuch as examining the validity of a suit often conditions the more of less strict enforcement of formal rules. The inference of such findings is that pleas in bar (general conclusion) in the future will, or so it seems, mainly play the part of the minimum formality that is necessary for trials to be held properly, and subsidiarily entail a pre-judgement of the substance of the case. Therefore, pleas in bar are a true reflection of the branch of law they are concerned with; the exemplify an ongoing trend towards a sort of. . . Natural administrative law.