Module leader: Professor Martin Trybus
Module description:
The term public procurement law describes the regulation of the purchasing activities of governments and public and private utilities in the transport, energy, water, and telecommunications sectors from private companies. The regulation of this activity aims at value for money and competition and EU public procurement law is designed to accommodate market access and transparency in an internal market of public and utilities contracts worth about €1.5 trillion annually. Public procurement is equally important for international trade and a crucial economic factor in any domestic system.
This module covers the public procurement law of the European Union (EU), the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the United Nations International Commission for Trade Law (UNCITRAL) in its economic and political contexts. The course will look at the entire EU public procurement law comprising of provisions of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), a set of secondary instruments, a substantial body of case law, and a number of interpretative communications of the Commission. EU public procurement law will be put in its international context as both a model for public procurement reform across the globe and through its interaction with the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) of the WTO. EU and GPA rules will be compared with those of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Procurement.
Seminar topics:
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Aims and objectives of EU public procurement regulation, the GPA, the UNCITRAL Model Law;
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Requirement of the TFEU regarding public procurement, the public procurement process according to the EU Public Sector Procurement Directive, the GPA, the UNCITRAL Model Law: procedures, publication, specifications, qualification, award criteria;
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The regime of the EC Utilities Procurement Directive; social and environmental criteria;
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EU/GPA/UNCITRAL defence procurement law;
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International procurement reform and EU enlargement
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Corruption in public procurement
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Public procurement and industrial, social, and environmental objectives
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Review and remedies under the EU, GPA, and UNCITRAL regimes
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Inter-action of EU public procurement law with the GPA;
Methods of assessment
Modules on the LLM programmes will be assessed in one of the following ways. As this website is set up in advance, it is not possible to specify which method of assessment will be implemented for each module.
Either:
Or
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One 3-hour written examination
If you'd like to find out how a module will be assessed in the forthcoming academic year please contact the LLM Programmes Administrator at Law-LLM@contacts.bham.ac.uk.