Conseil d'État

The Conseil d'État, or Council of State, is a French governmental body with two roles: it advises the executive branch on legal questions and it serves as the supreme administrative court, one of the two branches of the French judiciary. Napoleon established it in 1799 as successor to the King's Council, the Conseil du Roi, whose roots reach back to the thirteenth century. It sits in the Palais-Royal in Paris and is made up mostly of senior legal officers who belong to a Grand Corps of the French State and are recruited chiefly from top graduates of the École nationale d'administration, now renamed the Institut national du service public. A general session is presided over by the Prime Minister or the Minister of Justice, but in practice the Vice President, ranked the most important civil servant in France, presides at nearly all assemblies. The Council is divided into seven divisions, among them a litigation section that hears administrative claims, a report and studies section that writes the annual report, and sections that review government orders and statutory instruments before they are signed.