Legal forms of administration activity — terminology and systematics

Abstract

Key terms found in subject literature on the activities of public administration contain, among others, methods and forms of public administration activity. They serve as research tools for both the administrative law and administration education. Occasionally, although with decreasing frequency, the notion of an instrument of law appears, but it bears a different utilitarian value. It is considered useful for such analyses that underline the specifics of the researched administrative law, while methods and forms rather serve to synthesise and generalise a larger number of phenomena. Sometimes the difference between the form of activity and the instrument becomes blurry and the notions are used interchangeably. Commonly, the forms of activity are classified as authoritative and non-authoritative, public law and private law, unilateral and bilateral (or multilateral), legal and actual, external and internal to administration. This work describes forms of administrative activities, but it also mentions that attempts at creating an exhaustive catalogue of legal forms of administrative activity, commonly accepted by academia, have been unsuccessful. This is the result of objective and subjective obstacles. The latter ones are individualisation of declarations — avoidance of copying another’s classification; the former are on one side hybrid features of some forms of activities on the border of the traditional and well-recognised (with the example of a blurry character of some of the types of “rulings” bordering on decisions and normative acts) and on the other — the abundance of non-authoritative forms.