A journey into public law with Pascale Idoux

" One day a colleague from another discipline jokingly asked me: but what does a legal researcher look for? Articles in the code? " He made me laugh! I know it's not always easy to understand what we do in this house. " The elegance of a smile visible even behind the mask, Pascale Idoux has the look and simplicity of those who are driven by their profession. And a CV as thick as a Dalloz.

Not familiar with legal references? Pascale Idoux starts from the beginning by setting the scene. The law? A toolbox," answers the researcher, "theeffectiveness or success of the law is when social, economic and political relationships run smoothly. There isalways friction, but the law is a tool for regulating, pacifying, concretizing values and giving strength to the collective." Public law? " It also governs relations between public institutions and private individuals. This is a topical issue, with health measures severely limiting individual freedoms."

Skilful steering

As with any good portrait, we go in search of the initial spark, the thing that triggered this vocation for public law. The answer comes with a laugh: " You'll find this funny ". She goes back to her first year of law studies at Montpellier University. As a young baccalaureate student, she was rather interested in philosophy and history. Knowing nothing about law studies, she chose constitutional law and legal history as her options, thus excluding civil law. "It was when I got to know the other students that I realized that civil law is the foundation of the foundation. In a lecture hall of six hundred, there must have been two or three of us who hadn't taken civil law. It was too late to change, but fortunately I liked it. The course that follows is sure to boost the confidence of any student who might be doubting their choice.

The poorly (and happily) oriented student eventually became a doctor and then a teacher-researcher. This dual status soon led her to take on new challenges and new themes. She took up the torch of the International School of Nuclear Law, following the retirement of its founder. " It was a highly original creation in Montpellier, a sort of summer university that awarded a DU. We had 60 different nationalities, and people asking terrible legal questions, like these insurers examining how to insure against nuclear risk! It was quite a hair-raising experience. Having become a professor of administrative law, a branch of public law, at the University of Montpellier, in 2009 she became co-director of the magistère in applied public law, then co-director of the master's degree now renamed public law and litigation. A position she still holds, while also heading up the law and political science scientific department.

Europe: a Copernican revolution

On the research front, she became a member of Cream, Montpellier's center for research and administrative studies. Public law offers many avenues of research, some of which bring you closer to the hemicycles. " A public law researcher has to be forward-looking, projecting himself into the future to try and anticipate legal problems and help produce a thought process. It's not when an amendment falls in the middle of the night in the National Assembly that we have time to launch a wide-ranging discussion."

In 2012, it crossed the border into French law and became a member of the European Public Law Organization (EPLO). Based in Greece, this organization organizes an annual scientific event bringing together academics from all over Europe. " It's a place where we discuss the major issues of public law with jurists from several countries, whether academics, State Councillors or the equivalent in other countries. And here too, in terms of culture shock, it can be a real eye-opener!

For the researcher, the transition to the European framework represents THE Copernican revolution in her discipline, public economic law. It's a subject to which she devotes herself avidly, noting that to build Europe, states have had to deconstruct whole swathes of their law, without systematically putting in place a real common project. This question is at the heart of a collective work (1) that she co-piloted with Jean-Bernard Auby. " Difficulties in supplying masks, followed by vaccination problems, have made Europe aware of its shortcomings. Having done away with everything that stood in the way of the movement of activities and goods from one country to another, how can we now use public law to help build a proactive common economic and industrial policy? "

At the crossroads of disciplines

In 2013, Pascale Idoux joined the Institut Universitaire de France as a junior member for five years. This status opened the doors to the Institut des Hautes Études de l'Entreprise (IHEE), where she and some forty others embarked on a singular year-long adventure. " We were a fairly diverse group: journalists, trade unionists, CAC 40 start-ups, politicians, magistrates... All these people would occasionally board a bus, train or plane to visit companies, attend conferences and debrief together ". From this experience, the researcher drew her taste for encounters and interdisciplinarity. " We came from broadly the same socio-professional categories, shared common interests and readings, yet we didn't approach things in the same way, and that taught us to be wary of ourselves ".

In the end, it was her specialization in public economic law that finally converted her to this cross-disciplinary approach. As she began working with regulatory authorities such as the Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA) on ways to adapt to the emergence of digital platforms like Netflix, she realized that to take her legal expertise any further, she also needed to understand economics. " At the time, itwas invaluable for meto have colleagues who were economists, very high-level in their discipline but able to explain to me simply the background to the economic debates that I was discovering as a lawyer. Itwas then that I realized how useful and pleasurable it can be to cross these different points of view. A constant link with economics that she maintains by updating every two years the manual of public economic law founded in the 90s by Montpellier professor Jean-Philippe Colson.

From digital to communications law

It was during this assignment for the CSA that she returned to electronic communications and digital law (2). " I'm very interested in it because it completely overhauls the perimeters of rules and authorities. It's stimulating to try and understand the phenomena that are revolutionizing or redistributing the cards in our specialist fields ". Pascale Idoux is interested in the issues at stake, the decision-making practices of regulatory authorities and communications law, publishing columns on this highly topical subject. " Can Twitter cut off the account of a sitting president? How should we measure the responsibility of platforms in the fight against illegal content? These are just some of the questions we can ask ourselves," she explains.

Another example is the sanction imposed by the CSA on the Cnews channel following discriminatory comments made on air by one of its columnists. This is a highly sensitive area of public law, which calls into question the fragile relationship between freedom of expression and the supervision by regulatory authorities of what may or may not be broadcast. "It's a field that's been agitating legal experts a lot. Our field is constantly changing and interacting with society, which allows me to take an interest in many things, without ever forgetting to return to the central question: What do all these major issues project onto my small area of expertise? "

(1) Le gouvernement économique européen, 2017, edited by Jean-Bernard Auby and Pascale Idoux, collection droit administratif, published by Bruylant.

(2) This month, together with Christophe Albiges and Laura Milano, two colleagues from the University of Montpellier, she is publishing a book entitled Numérique, droit et justice, éditions du CREAM.