France keeps a whole separate court system just for suing the state
When a French citizen challenges a ministry, a town hall or even a private firm running a public service, the case skips the ordinary courts entirely. It goes to administrative tribunals topped by the Council of State, a parallel judiciary that shaped how much of continental Europe polices its governments.
Administrative law is the branch of public law covering what executive agencies do: writing regulations, deciding individual cases and enforcing statutes in fields from immigration and broadcasting to tax and transport. It grew enormously during the twentieth century as parliaments everywhere created agencies to manage economic and social life. Most civil law countries route disputes with those agencies to specialised courts with their own procedures, unlike most common law systems, which use ordinary judges.
France is the classic model. Its judiciary handles civil and criminal matters, while the administrative branch takes any case involving a public body. The tribunaux administratifs hear claims first, appeal courts sit above them, and the Conseil d'État is the last word. Over time these courts built a body of general principles, often before constitutions spelled them out: the right to challenge any administrative decision, equal treatment of public service users, equal access to state jobs regardless of political opinion, and legal certainty. That French approach influenced Belgium, Greece, Turkey and Tunisia.
Germany developed a parallel tradition. Its scholars treated administrative law as a distinct field from the late nineteenth century, though they still disagree over how to define administration itself. Core rule-of-law ideas bind officials: they may only burden a person on authority granted by the legislature, they cannot act retroactively, and every measure must be suitable, necessary and appropriate, a test known as proportionality. Most of the actual administering is done by the federal states rather than Berlin.
Elsewhere the field is younger. China had almost nothing resembling modern administrative law before the reforms that began under Deng Xiaoping. A 1989 statute first let citizens sue over government action, and it was amended in 2014 to make such challenges easier; exams and yearly appraisals for civil servants followed in 1993, and a state compensation law in 1994. In Brazil, a 1998 constitutional reform under Fernando Henrique Cardoso created regulatory agencies inside the executive branch.
Source: Administrative law
