Reasons for the Growth of Administrative Law — Administrative Law Notes

Reasons for the Growth of Administrative Law

For most of the 19th century the ruling idea was laissez-faire [French: “let it be” — the State leaves the economy alone]. The State was a night-watchman: it kept order, collected taxes, and otherwise stayed out of the way. Two World Wars, mass poverty and the arrival of the welfare State killed that idea. Once the State took on the job of feeding, housing, employing and insuring its people, it needed vast new powers — and administrative law grew to fit them like a shadow grows with the object that casts it.

Why did administrative law grow so fast?

The single deepest reason is the change in the philosophy of the State — from a negative, hands-off State to a positive, welfare State. Everything else follows from that. Learn these factors as a numbered list; each is one mark:

The concept of the welfare State. The State now provides education, health, housing, employment and social security. Providing services needs power to plan, licence, price and distribute — and that power needs law to control it.
Inadequacy of the legislature. Parliament has neither the time nor the technical knowledge to make detailed rules for railways, drugs, atomic energy or telecom. It passes a skeleton Act and delegates the detail — the birth of delegated legislation (Unit 2).
Inadequacy of the ordinary courts. Civil courts are slow, expensive, technical and bound by rigid procedure. Modern disputes (tax, service, industrial, rent) needed cheap, quick, expert forums — so tribunals and administrative adjudication grew (Unit 3).
Scope for experimentation. Administrative rule-making is flexible. A rule that fails can be amended overnight; an Act of Parliament cannot. The administration can experiment where the legislature cannot.
Preventive justice and speed. The State must often act before harm occurs — seal a factory, seize adulterated food, detain in an emergency — not wait for a court to convict after the event.
Industrialisation and urbanisation. Crowded cities and complex industry created problems (pollution, planning, labour, public health) that only continuous administrative regulation could manage.
The failure of laissez-faire. The Depression and the wars showed that an unregulated market produced misery. Regulation — and therefore administrative power — became unavoidable.

⚠️ Do NOT confuse the growth of administrative law with the growth of delegated legislation. Delegated legislation (Unit 2) is only one of the reasons administrative law grew; it is a part, not the whole. In the exam, keep this topic about the welfare-State shift and all seven factors, not just rule-making.

A classic formulation of the shift: “The development of the administrative process is the result of the inability of the traditional legislative and judicial institutions to satisfy the needs of a modern welfare society; it is not the negation of the rule of law but its extension to new fields.”

In Simple Terms: The State took on huge new welfare jobs. Parliament could not write all the detail and courts could not decide all the disputes, so power flowed to the administration — and administrative law grew to keep that power in check.

flowchart LR
    A["Laissez-faire State<br/>(night-watchman)"] --> B["Welfare State<br/>(positive, service State)"]
    B --> C["Vast new executive power"]
    C --> D["Legislature too slow<br/>-> delegated legislation"]
    C --> E["Courts too slow<br/>-> tribunals"]
    C --> F["Need for speed<br/>-> preventive action"]
    D --> G["Growth of Administrative Law"]
    E --> G
    F --> G
    classDef box fill:#E6F3FF,stroke:#1E3A8A,color:#111;
    class A,B,C,D,E,F,G box;

🧩 WORKED EXAMPLE — Spotting the “growth” factor

Facts. Parliament enacts a Food Safety Act in two pages and empowers the Food Authority to fix, by rule, the permitted limits of every additive in every food.

Rule. Where the subject is too technical and too changeable for the legislature itself, it delegates the detail — one of the recognised factors in the growth of administrative law (inadequacy of the legislature + need for flexibility).

Apply. Parliament cannot itself list safe additive limits for thousands of foods, nor revise them each time science advances. It sets policy; the expert Authority fills the detail.

Conclusion. The Act illustrates two growth-factors at once — the legislature’s inadequacy and the need for experimentation/flexibility — the very forces that built administrative law.

Case Laws

In re Delhi Laws Act (1951) — recognised that a modern legislature must delegate; delegation is a practical necessity of the welfare State.
Maneka Gandhi v Union of India (1978) — as State power expanded, the courts expanded fairness to match it.

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