Silvia Rizzuto Ferruzza is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in EU Law at the Department of Legal Studies of the University of Bologna (Italy), where she contributes to the Horizon Europe-funded project EUSAiR focusing on the governance of artificial intelligence within the European Union, with particular attention to regulatory sandboxes, administrative cooperation, accountability mechanisms, and the implementation of the EU AI Act.
Silvia studied law at the University of Trento, at the University of Maastricht and Shanghai International Studies University, and holds an LLM in European Law from the University of Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas and a Ph.D from the University of Luxembourg. Her doctoral dissertation, Frontex and Effective Remedies: Assessing Mechanisms of Legal Protection in a Shared Enforcement Space (forthcoming, Larcier-Intersentia), offers a comprehensive analysis of judicial protection and accountability in the context of EU integrated administration and the Agencies of the AFSJ, using the European Border and Coast Guard as a case study for examining the legal and institutional challenges arising from composite enforcement structures.
As qualified lawyer admitted to the Italian Bar, she gained practical experience in criminal law and in the fields of asylum, migration law and human rights, including working at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin and at the Court of Justice of the European Union.
As an Emile Noël Fellow at NYU School of Law, Silvia will investigate executive powers arising from the operational role of EU agencies, the effects of their allocation on effective judicial protection for persons subject to their exercise, and how hybrid and composite administrative arrangements challenge traditional legal categories of control and access to justice within the European Union’s integrated administrative space.
Contact: sr8824@nyu.edu
Research Project
The implementation of EU law has traditionally relied on indirect administration and a clear allocation of competences between the EU and Member States. More recent developments reveal increasing reliance on shared enforcement mechanisms, composite administrative procedures, and integrated governance structures, indicating a structural transformation in the exercise of executive power within the EU’s multilevel framework. EU authorities and agencies are now endowed with autonomous powers of supervision, investigation, and decision-making.
The EU has progressively developed new forms of executive power based on intense cooperation between EU and Member State authorities. As a result, executive power is today increasingly organised through integrated and hybrid arrangements reflecting an advanced degree of European administrative integration. These dynamics affect the very structure of public authority, giving rise to a process of hybridisation of executive power that risks blurring the distinctions between EU and Member State action, between preparatory and final acts, and between binding and non-binding measures.
In this context, a tension emerges at the heart of European governance. While the expansion of executive action has often been justified in functional terms, it reveals a structural friction within the Union’s constitutional order. While the Treaties rest on a formal allocation of competences, the effective exercise of power increasingly follows a hybrid and relational logic, in which power is constituted through cooperation rather than through formal attribution.
On one hand, hybrid arrangements enhance the effectiveness of public action and are consistent with the EU’s multilevel system. On the other hand, they obscure responsibility allocation, fragment accountability channels, and weaken access to justice, posing significant challenges to democracy and the rule of law. The project investigates this transformation through three analytical strands. First, it reconstructs hybridisation as a structural feature of EU integrated administration, examining its implications for the separation of powers and institutional balance. Second, it critically examines the consequences of hybrid arrangements for control and accountability: the difficulties of attributing responsibility across composite decision-making processes, the fragmentation of oversight mechanisms, and the limited effectiveness of judicial protection, particularly where executive action unfolds through factual conduct, soft law, or instruments that are not formally challengeable. Third, it explores whether the current EU system of remedies is adequate to respond to these transformations, and considers whether the contestability of public power may offer a meaningful criterion for rethinking mechanisms of control and access to justice within the European administrative space.