Why Is Administrative Law Important?

The traditional theory of public administration holds that elected officials make policy and administrators implement it.Whether this neat distinction ever applied in practice is doubtful.Certainly it does not apply today.The scope of modern government is so vast and the issues government confronts are so technically complex that elected officials can attend directly only to a minute proportion of the items on the public agenda.Consequently，much of the day-to-day responsibility for making public policy is delegated—formally or informally—to public administrators.This is what is meant by the concept of the administrative state.Public administrators，not members of Congress，are the ones who determine safety standards for nuclear reactors，set the seasonal bag limits for hunters of migratory birds，decree who should be awarded broadcast licenses，and decide thousands of other questions，large and small.(https://www.daowen.com)

The term we use to describe the exercise of this delegated power is administrative discretion.Administrative discretion is said to be formal whenever a legislative body explicitly grants decisionmaking authority to an administrative entity，as in the case of regulatory commissions.Discretion is considered informal whenever autonomous decisionmaking power arises naturally out of the structure of the situation.Police officers，for instance，exercise informal administration discretion constantly as they determine how to enforce the law in specific cases.Administrative discretion of either sort constitutes a serious theoretical challenge to representative democracy，the core assumption of which is that public officials must be held accountable to the public.How can we，the members of the public，ensure that the discretionary power wielded by unelected public administrators is exercised consistently with public purposes?Administrative law is one of several answers to this question.In effect，administrative law represents a check on administrative discretion.