Introduction

You apply for a driving licence at the RTO in Worli, and an officer you have never met decides whether you get it. You open a restaurant, and a civic inspector decides whether it may stay open. A hundred years ago neither decision would have needed an officer at all. Today almost every part of your life meets some official who holds power over it. Administrative law asks one question about all of them: who checks the people who hold this power?

In two minutes

Administrative law is the body of law that controls the powers and procedures of public authorities, and above all lets courts check whether an official acted within the law, fairly and reasonably.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Administrative Law on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.