When the Council was first created in 1835, it was a deliberate import. The young Kingdom of Greece modeled it directly on the French Conseil d'État, the advisory and administrative court Napoleon had established. The Greek version was given two jobs: to advise on draft decrees, and to issue binding administrative rulings. The borrowed institution still shows its French parentage two centuries later, in everything from its structure to the legal doctrines it follows. But the early Council had no firm ground beneath it. The Constitution of 1844 swept it away.

What followed was a political tug-of-war played out over the institution's existence. After King Otto was deposed in 1862, the national assembly that gathered decided to bring the Council back, this time to help prepare and debate proposed laws. The reprieve was brief. The Constitution of 1864 left its fate to the next parliament, and on 25 November 1865 a law was passed abolishing the Council of State a second time. For the rest of the nineteenth century, Greece governed its administration without a supreme administrative court at all. A provision in the Constitution of 1911 called for the Council's revival, but the words sat unfulfilled for years.

The Council finally took lasting form in 1928, under a law passed after the Constitution of 1927 created the constitutional space for it. Konstantinos Raktivan became its first president, serving from 1928 until 1935 and steadying an institution that had collapsed twice before. From that point the Council endured. Its authority now rests on Article 95 of the present Greek constitution, reinforced by legislation and presidential decree. Its presidency has since passed through a long line of distinguished jurists, several of whom stepped briefly into the highest political offices in moments of national crisis, serving as caretaker prime ministers or interim heads of state when the country needed a trusted, nonpartisan hand.

What the Council does today reaches into the everyday machinery of Greek government. Before most regulatory decrees can take effect, they must be sent to the Council for review of their legality, and although ministers are not strictly bound to follow its opinion, they almost always do. A decree issued without that review can be struck down. Since the constitutional amendment of 2001, only the Council's full Plenary Session can rule on whether a law is constitutional, making it the ultimate check on the legality of state action. As the top of Greece's administrative justice system, it hears challenges to government acts and has the final say on the legal questions beneath them, though it pointedly declines to second-guess a handful of high political acts, such as dissolving parliament, declaring mobilization, or granting pardons.

The Council sits in the former Arsakeion, a grand neoclassical building in central Athens that began life in the nineteenth century as a school for girls and now houses one of the three great bodies of Greek public administration. Beyond its own borders, the Council has woven itself into the wider world of law: it helped found the international and European associations of supreme administrative courts, and it takes part in the Council of Europe's Venice Commission, the continent's advisory body on constitutional questions. From an imported idea that twice failed to survive, it has become both a pillar of the Greek republic and a recognized voice in the law of Europe.