Modern Approaches to Understanding the Administrative Process as a Result and the Basis for the Development of Domestic Administrative Procedural Legislation

Abstract

The article provides an overview and analysis of modern approaches to understanding the administrative process as a sectoral type of legal process that have developed in domestic theory, taking into account the changes that have occurred in the procedural legislation of the Russian Federation over the past three decades after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The process is classified as follows: complex on a jurisdictional basis; integrative; complex on the basis of managerial, judicial. Particular attention is paid to the critical analysis of the judicial approach to understanding the administrative process, the reasons for the disagreements of its supporters, firstly, with representatives of the science of civil procedural law regarding the determination of the procedural nature of administrative proceedings, and, secondly, with specialists in administrative law regarding the denial of the presence of administrative-procedural forms of activity of subjects of public administration and attempts thereby to disavow the domestic doctrine of the administrative process. The methodology for studying the nature of procedural activity is based on the analysis of the sectoral subject of legal regulation and three types of a unified method of substantive regulation (civil, administrative and criminal), the implementation channels of which are varieties of legal process in the form of civil, administrative and criminal process which are based on an adversarial or investigative type of jurisdictional process, or a law-granting type of legal process. This methodological approach made it possible: 1) to establish the sectoral procedural nature of administrative proceedings, which is determined not by the subject of a “dispute about law”, but by the method of legal regulation, represented by the civil law type of regulation of public relations, the implementation channel of which is an adversarial type of jurisdictional legal process, which is its nature as a civil process; 2) to identify the shortcomings of the model of administrative proceedings enshrined in Russian legislation, the essence of which is that an adversarial type of jurisdictional process intended for judicial protection of a person who has suffered from the actions of an official and, acting as a plaintiff in the case, is applied to persons who have violated the established prohibitions and restrictions, or committed administrative offenses and acting in the case as a defendant; 3) to substantiate the presence in the structure of the administrative process of procedural forms of activity of subjects of public administration as a channel for the implementation of the administrative-legal type of regulation of public relations and determine the list of administrative proceedings.