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Administrative Law

The executive branches of government, from the local to the
national level, are empowered to administer laws for the welfare of
society. To accomplish this end, agencies, departments, bureaus, and
commissions are set up as part of an executive branch. These

administrative bodies are created by legislative bodies to carry out a
wide variety of functions both on behalf of government and for the
public. These functions include the overseeing of education, traffic

control, tax collecting, defense, highway and bridge construction, quality
control of consumer goods, slum clearance, and public transportation,
among others.

Administrative bodies are empowered by legislatures with the
authority to do their work. Their power may be allocated in two ways:
specific statutory directions that tell an agency exactly how it shall

operate, or discretionary authorization that allows an agency to devise its
own regulations.
In many cases, it is a mixture of the two. The term administrative
law has come to mean both the regulations that govern the internal

operation of an agency or department and the procedures it may use in
the performance of its tasks.
The powers that agencies have are called delegated powers; they

do not originate in the constitution of a nation as do the powers of the
legislature, the courts, and the executive branch. Because the powers arc
delegated, or granted, they must be subject to some check by a higher
authority so that agencies do not exercise their power in a way that

would be detrimental to the public good. The process by which the
activities of agencies are checked and controlled by the courts is called
judicial review.

Judicial review inquires into the legal competence of public
agencies, the validity of their regulations, and the fairness and adequacy
of their procedures. If, for instance, a government department decided to

build a new highway through a city, citizens could sue the government
to stop the project until all environmental issues had been considered. A
court or tribunal would then have the task of deciding the validity of the

case.
In the United States the court systems exercise the power of
judicial review, and they have far-reaching authority in doing so. In the

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