행정법학의 개념과 그 외연(外延) ― 제도중심의 공법학방법론을 위한 시론(試論) ―

In the study of administrative law, often the terms administrative law and public law are used interchangeably but there seems to be fundamental differences in the concept and scope between the two. While the concept of the latter derived from the distinction between private and public law, that of the former emerged in the course of the generalization of its study. Such usage of the terms appears to be rooted in the fact that a certain fine-tuning process for the two terms has not yet been properly carried out. Administrative law is a typical branch of public law. It is a field of law whose main purpose is to understand various public law systems of a nation and a community. Therefore, such a purpose needs not be limited to control only the litigable of the systems through administrative litigation and/or judicial review. Rather, the primary task of the study of administrative law should be to understand and to provide bases to design each system, relatively independent from litigability and reviewability. For this reason, the methodology of public law should take, as its subject matters, both administrative process which can be captured by a certain degree of litigation and/or judicial review and objective systems which are hard to be captured in such ways. If this approach is followed, the litigation-oriented legal methodology and the system-oriented legal methodology will mutually organically put together the areas of public law and this will enable a comprehensive understanding of its system. Therefore, the study of administrative law should be a system of legal theory which deals not only with laws relating to 'administration' but also with 'national systems, administrative process and laws relating to public systems.' The national systems which include the legislative and judical systems extend from the legislations relating to the prestige of public law such as national contracts, national property and national liability to various kinds of public law status of local governments. The administrative process, having been the primary subject matter of the general study of administrative law, is the most important subject matter of this field and remains as a logic system focused on administrative dispositions. Lastly, the public systems, despite the limited role of the administrative agencies, do have a very important meaning in public law and include legal personality under public law and the union system.