Administrative law

Administrative law expanded greatly during the 20th century, as legislative bodies worldwide created more government agencies to regulate the social, economic and political spheres of human interaction.

In 1998 a constitutional reform led by the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso introduced regulatory agencies as a part of the executive branch.

In Chile, the President of the Republic exercises the administrative function, in collaboration with several ministries or other authorities with ministerial rank.

Administrative law in China was virtually non-existent before the economic reform era initiated by Deng Xiaoping.

Since the 1980s China has constructed a new legal framework for administrative law, establishing control mechanisms for overseeing the bureaucracy, and disciplinary committees for the Chinese Communist Party.

In 1989, China established its Administrative Litigation Law, which provides and avenue for people to challenge government action.

The 1993 State Civil Servant Provisional Regulations (国家公务员暂行条例) changed the way government officials were selected and promoted, requiring that they pass exams and yearly appraisals, and introducing a rotation system.

[6] Over the course of their history, France's administrative courts have developed an extensive and coherent case law (jurisprudence constante) and legal doctrine (principes généraux du droit [fr] and principes fondamentaux reconnus par les lois de la République [fr]), often before similar concepts were enshrined in constitutional and legal texts.

It sets out the tasks, aims and powers, as well as the organization and procedure, for all public authorities (German: Behörden).

This approach leads to disputes about whether to treat acts of public authority as acts of administration (and therefore executive) even when they are performed by component parts of the state (that is to say, the government) that the law formally classifies as a legislative or a judicial body: For instance, the parliament may impose a fine on one of its members for misbehavior, or a presiding judge may direct a disruptive member of the public to be removed from the viewing gallery.

There is some danger of circular reasoning, since the formal categorization of the organizational unit may, in turn, derive from some material conception of its function.

This discussion is of seen as being of particular importance when considering the role of administrative law in maintaining the division of government powers.

[23] Nevertheless, certain features may be seen as being characteristic of administration: According to Maurer and Waldhoff, administration is social engineering (exerting influence on the non-state, societal domain) (1), oriented towards some conception of the (ever-changing) public interest (2), that consists of taking action in the present, with a view to engineering the future (3), and that comprises concrete measures to regulate individual cases and to realize particular plans (4).

[24] Scholarly treatises of German administrative law are almost always split into two parts: doctrines and rules that can be found across-the-board (allgemeines Verwaltungsrecht); and doctrines and rules that exist only in certain parts of administrative law (German: besonderes Verwaltungsrecht, lit.

Germany's principal piece of legislation concerning the legal forms and principles common to most fields[a] of its public administration is the Law on Administrative Procedure (German: Verwaltungsverfahrensgesetz, abbreviated VwVfG); before the enactment of this law in 1977, these rules had only been general principles developed in the scholarly literature and the courts.

All 16 German Länder have, however, enacted a Law on Administrative Procedure of their own that is nearly word-for-word identical with the federal VwVfG.

The administrative power, originally called "executive", is to organize resources and people whose function is devolved to achieve the public interest objectives as defined by the law.

An example involves objecting to a traffic ticket with the district attorney (officier van justitie), after which the decision can be appealed in court.

Often these procedures are coupled with legislation or other common law doctrines that establish standards for proper rulemaking.

Congress has also created some special judicial bodies known as Article I tribunals to handle some areas of administrative law.

In response to the rapid creation of new independent agencies in the early twentieth century (see discussion below), Congress enacted the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in 1946.

It is important to note, though, that agencies can only act within their congressionally delegated authority,[38] and must comply with the requirements of the APA.

It incorporates basic principles with only enough elaboration of detail to support essential features, therefore it is a "model", and not a "uniform", act.

The present version is the 2010 Model State Administrative Procedure Act (MSAPA) which maintains the continuity with earlier ones.

Stephen Breyer, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice from 1994 to 2022, divides the history of administrative law in the United States into six discrete periods, in his book, Administrative Law & Regulatory Policy (3d Ed., 1992): The agricultural sector is one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the U.S. economy, as it is regulated in various ways at the international, federal, state, and local levels.