Editing Administrative law (section)

==== Scope of administrative law ====
German legal scholarship does not have an agreed-upon definition for public administration.

In one sense, administration – more precisely, everything that is subject to administrative law – is conceptualized as being all state activity of a certain type (material definition of public administration). 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.

The opposite approach – the formalist definition of public administration – begins its examination by considering all those public authorities intended (judging by their lawful charter, organizational context, internal structure, and performed tasks) to do the work of public administration, and equates their functioning with public administration. 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. Some functions that might, in the material view, be seen as not of the executive type, and thus not as belonging to the field of administration (such as the creation of rules with the force of law, which are usually thought of as legislative), would then be held to the standards of administrative law, and not another field of law.

This discussion is of seen as being of particular importance when considering the role of administrative law in maintaining the [[Separation of powers|division of government powers]]. For this purpose, a traditional approach tries negatively to define administration by subtracting those operations of the state which cannot be called administration, namely law-making and adjudication.<ref>{{harvnb|Maurer|Waldhoff|2024|loc=§ 1, at margin note 6}} name Otto Mayer (''Deutsches Verwaltungsrecht'', 1895/96, vol. I, p. 7) and Walter Jellinek (''Verwaltungsrecht'', 1928, p. 6) as early and influential proponents of this model.</ref> Using this negative definition, though, requires law-making and adjudication to be defined first, and leaves some activities that are a poor fit for the term "administration", such as the cabinet government's political leadership decisions, within the bounds of the definition.{{sfn|Maurer|Waldhoff|2024|loc=§ 1, at margin note 6}}

Positive definitions abound, but none has won out over the others, or been entirely convincing to scholars of German administrative law.{{sfn|Maurer|Waldhoff|2024|loc=§ 1, at margin note 8}} 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).{{sfn|Maurer|Waldhoff|2024|loc=§ 1, at margin notes 9–12}}

Scholarly treatises of German administrative law are almost always split into two parts: doctrines and rules that can be found across-the-board ({{lang|de|allgemeines Verwaltungsrecht}}); and doctrines and rules that exist only in certain parts of administrative law ({{langx|de|besonderes Verwaltungsrecht|lit=special administrative law}}) – e.g. police law, urban planning law, or local government law.