Comparing administrative laws

This chapter considers how comparisons among administrative laws and regulatory regimes reflect national choices on separations of powers, government design, its agencies, and agents to exercise control over bureaucracies, persons, and property. It reveals how mainstream approaches have functionally compared governmental and administrative powers, types of regulation, institutional organizations and procedures, legal redress, and judicial review in a variety of legal regimes. In highlighting the variance in form and structure in regulatory models, this chapter surveys both conventional and critical approaches openly engaging with power, culture, and knowledge. In grounding the chapter in a practical discussion on the regulation of the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter delves into the political spectrum and the non-legal layers of apparently neutral public health responses to the pandemic. Readers are therefore challenged to consider the discriminative and distributive effects of varying administrative and regulatory approaches, as well as their effectiveness vis à vis the spreading of the pandemic.