TERMINOLOGICAL PROBLEMS LAW OF UKRAINE «ON ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURE»

Abstract

Purpose. The article is focused on the analysis of the content of determining certain termsformulated in the Law of Ukraine «On Administrative Procedure» with further provision ofsuggestions on their improvement.Methods. The research methodology consists of various methods of scientific cognition, includingcomparative and legal, systemic and structural, analysis, synthesis and others, which allow ussystematically and consistently to solve scientific tasks, to study and compare the scholars’ pointsof view, the provisions of legal acts of the respective countries, court caselaw and to formulate theauthor’s conclusions.The results. The author of the article claims that domestic researchers, including drafters ofregulatory legal acts, are rather superficial and sometimes irresponsible while formulatingdefinitions of the relevant legal terms, which has an extremely negative effect on the efficiency ofadministration of the law. It is due to the fact that the definition contains an abstract model andwhich is compared to the real existing social relations, which are waiting to be regulated with thehelp of an administrative act.The content of the definitions of the following terms «administrative body», «administrative act»,«arbitrary power» has been analyzed in the article. Those terms have received legal wording inthe Law of Ukraine «On Administrative Procedure».Conclusions. Based on the results of the relevant studies, the author has offered to change thedefinition of an administrative body and to understand it as any entity that performs publicadministration functions related to the adoption of an administrative act on a permanent or temporary basis. It has been proved that the legal definition of an administrative act suffers fromits incompleteness, which is manifested in the following: lack of the “link” of an administrativeact to the sphere of administrative and legal regulation; impossibility of extending the effect of anadministrative act to a group of entities, which can be determined on the basis of certain criteria;disregarding the possibility of an administrative act’s existence without an addressee; ignoringthe fact that an administrative act should be limited only by external impact.According to the author’s opinion, the definition of arbitrary power also seems problematic,since the specific features of this category were not taken into account during the process of itsdefinition. The author of the paper suggests to understand arbitrary power as a certain spacegiven to an administrative body in order to make a choice between several decisions permissiblefrom the point of view of law.