PA Lecture 4

Sources of administrative law. The concept of a public administration body and the territorial division in Poland

concept of sources of law

The determination of the sources of law is closely linked to the issue of how law is created (enacted or recognised as law), amended and repealed. The concept of ‘sources of law’ (from the Latin fontes iuris) – taken from Roman law (fontes iuris oriundi – ‘sources of the origin of law’) – has for centuries been distinguished from the similar, much broader term ‘sources of knowledge of law’ (fontes iuris cognoscendi). The latter category covers all materials, including official promulgation bodies, documents, publications and other forms of communication of information about the law.

The lack of clarity in defining the concept of ‘source of law’, which is fundamental to the legal order, the importance of this institution in a state governed by the rule of law, and the need to curb the phenomenon of ‘legal inflation’, including the elimination of the so-called grey area of law-making (extensive and serving the arbitrariness of the socialist administration), determined the standardisation of the issue of sources of law in the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, especially in Chapter III. The term ‘sources of law’ covers the creative (normative) general and abstract acts indicated here (although not defined), characterised by specific features, created by consensus (international agreements) or enacted unilaterally in the prescribed manner by constitutionally legitimate entities. If these acts contain norms classified as administrative law (which is often not easy to determine), we are dealing with sources of administrative law.

The introduction of the constitutional model of sources of law entailed the need to adapt not only newly created law to the requirements of the Constitution, but also existing law, including the revision and harmonisation of the existing legal order, in which various sub-statutory acts played – primarily in the sphere of administrative law – a significant, and in earlier years sometimes even a primary role. (Articles 87-94 of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland of 2 April 1997).

c

c

c

c

c

c