While the EU agencies that have been granted the power to adopt binding decisions are a diverse group, they at least share one feature: in all of them an organisationally separate administrative review body, i.e. a board of appeal, has been established. The review procedures before these boards must be exhausted before private parties can seize the EU courts and the boards therefore all fulfil a similar function: filtering cases before they end up before the courts and providing parties by expert-driven review. Sharing this common function as well as some common features, the boards of appeal of the different agencies remain heterogenous in their set up and functioning. This raises a host of questions from both a theoretic and practical perspective which this volume analyses in depth: how do the boards function, which kind of review do they offer, and how should they be conceptualized in the EU's overall system of legal protection against administrative action? To answer these questions, the volume's first part presents a series of case studies, covering all the EU boards of appeal currently in existence, while a second part looks into the horizontal issues raised by the phenomenon of the boards of appeal.

Merijn Chamon is Assistant Professor of EU Law at Maastricht University and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Bruges). He obtained his PhD at Ghent University on the topic of EU agencies. At the same institution he has also been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the Flemish Research Foundation on a project dedicated to mixed agreements in the EU's external relations. Merijn's research interests lie in EU constitutional, institutional, and procedural law as well as in the law of EU external relations.
Annalisa Volpato is Assistant Professor of European Administrative Law at Maastricht University. She is also Managing Editor of the Review of European Administrative Law. Annalisa obtained her Ph.D. in EU law at University of Padua and Maastricht University (double degree). She was visiting researcher at York University and at EUI (Florence). Her research interests concern the institutional and administrative aspects of EU law, in particular the delegation of powers to EU institutions, EU agencies and standardisation bodies.
Mariolina Eliantonio is Professor of European and Comparative Administrative Law and Procedure. Her research is focused on the enforcement of European law before national and EU courts. She does research specifically on the theme of access to court before national and European courts (with a special focus on environmental matters), on the Europeanisation process of national procedural administrative law and on the judicial review of the new modes of governance, especially soft law and technical standardisation.