The treatment of silty and clayey soils with lime (calcium oxide or hydroxide) is a technique widely used for soils improvement and stabilization, and applied in the context of roads, highways, railways, platforms construction. However the principles of lime treatment for hydraulic earthen structures remain barely applied or even forgotten (European case). If existing testimonials (levees, dams, mainly in US and Australia) are evidences that show effectiveness and durability of lime-treated structures, there was a necessity to evaluate a series of unknown characteristics and relevant properties of lime-treated soils for an application in hydraulic context, through laboratory studies and full-scale experiments. This paper relates results of several research programs, and focuses on a multi-scale approach for assessment of lime-treated soils properties, relevant for hydraulic earthen structures : laboratory testing and full-scale lime-treated embankments. The conferred soil properties can lead to innovative earthfill dams and dikes designs by addressing some of the typical designer's problems, such as stability, watertightness, internal erosion, surface protection and flood control. This is a part of the objectives of a next ICOLD Bulletin CSD "Cemented Soil for Dams", which is due to be published in 2020.