.1 What This Unit Is About
Administrative law governs how public authorities lawfully exercise legal power — it exists to give government the authority needed to perform genuinely public functions, while simultaneously controlling that authority against arbitrary or unlawful exercise. The whole field can be organized around one simple relational chain: the legislature creates authority (through statute) → the administration exercises that authority → courts, tribunals, and other oversight mechanisms test whether that exercise was lawful.
.2 Meaning, Scope, and Significance
Administrative law concerns the powers, procedures, duties, and legal controls governing administrative authorities. It matters in practice because public bodies make an enormous number of decisions that directly affect individual rights, licences, benefits, regulatory compliance, and public employment — decisions a citizen may have no meaningful alternative to, unlike a private commercial transaction they could simply decline. Whenever confronted with a scenario involving a public authority’s decision, the three organizing questions administrative law asks are: what legal power did the authority actually have to make this decision? What procedure was it required to follow? And what remedy is available if it acted unlawfully?
.3 Nature and Contents
The field’s substantive content includes delegated (subordinate) legislation, administrative decision-making and discretion, tribunals, judicial review (the courts’ power to examine the legality, though generally not the underlying merits, of administrative decisions), and procedural fairness. A useful scoping point: administrative law focuses specifically on public authority — the exercise of governmental power — and should be kept distinct from general private law governing relationships between private parties.
.4 Administrative Ethics
Ethics guides how officials should exercise lawful discretion — precisely in the situations where formal rules do not dictate one single mechanical answer, leaving a genuine choice that must be guided by professional judgment and ethical principle rather than rule-following alone. Core concerns include integrity, impartiality, avoidance of conflict of interest, and orientation toward the public interest rather than private or personal benefit.
.5 Delegation of Authority and Delegated Legislation
Delegation transfers decision-making authority to another official or body, but crucially cannot lawfully create more power than the underlying enabling legal framework itself grants — a delegate can never exercise authority beyond what the original delegating authority legitimately possessed. Delegated (subordinate) legislation allows a body authorized under an enabling statute to make detailed technical rules filling in the framework that statute establishes; such delegated rules remain legally subordinate to the Constitution and to the parent (enabling) statute, and are void to the extent they exceed the authority the parent statute actually granted — the doctrine of ultra vires (acting beyond legal power), a frequently tested principle throughout this unit.
.6 Administrative Tribunals
Administrative tribunals are specialized adjudicatory bodies established to resolve disputes within a particular, defined subject area (service tribunals for civil-service disputes, tax tribunals for revenue disputes) rather than general courts. Their acknowledged advantages are subject-matter expertise and procedural speed relative to ordinary courts; the corresponding safeguards genuinely necessary to legitimate this specialized adjudication are independence from the executive bodies whose decisions they review, a genuine opportunity for a fair hearing, a requirement for reasoned decisions, and continued availability of judicial oversight (typically through a limited right of appeal or judicial review to the ordinary courts) to guard against a tribunal itself acting unlawfully.
.7 Administrative Law in Pakistan
Pakistan-specific material should be grounded in the Constitution, relevant statutes, and the current court/tribunal framework, verified against up-to-date sources rather than relying on outdated institutional names or superseded legal positions, since institutional arrangements and case law develop over time. The field’s underlying purpose in the Pakistani context, as everywhere, is to control administrative discretion without eliminating the operational flexibility genuine public administration needs to function effectively.
Key takeaways for Unit VI
- The organizing chain — legislature creates authority → administration exercises it → courts/tribunals test legality — structures every topic in this unit; locate any specific question within this chain.
- Delegated legislation and delegation of authority are both bounded by the doctrine that a delegate cannot lawfully exercise more power than its enabling source actually possessed (ultra vires) — this single principle underlies both topics.
- Tribunals trade off expertise and speed against the need for independence, fair hearing, and continued judicial oversight — a strong answer states both the advantage and the necessary safeguard together.