The structure of the State and its influence on Administrative Law: Analysis in the German, Spanish and French legal systems

Abstract

There has been a long and interesting discussion between those who maintain that the state determines the law and those who defend that it is the right that does it, reaching the point of identifying them. On this occasion, this article makes an analysis of the way in which the State and its structural conformations affect administrative law based on the forms adopted in the German, French and Spanish legal systems. It is clear, at least for the Colombian legal system, that administrative law has a strong antecedent in France; for this reason, the State structure adopted in said country has had a clear influence on the normative regulations to which the administration’s activity is subject; to this extent, the decentralized unitary state form exerts a clear influence on this branch of public law. But the other forms of State, such as the federal and the autonomous, also exert notorious influence on the normative regulations of administrative law; even more so in the institutions that make it up as the cornerstone of these legal systems, because the substantial aspects in one way or another end up being identical. In effect, the notions of Administration, sovereignty, public power, public prerogatives, functions of the state, among others, are very similar, perhaps not identical, in the three forms of state and therefore, in the three legal systems, as well as the structures that make it up have marked differences, because one is a decentralized unitary state, the other is a federal state and the third is an autonomous state; but all of them in what corresponds to administrative action, they do so through a mechanism that in our concept is identical to all of them, such as the administrative act.