Administrative Justice in the Transitional States
This chapter surveys the state of academic knowledge, conceptual consistency, and theoretical debate relevant for two subtopics of administrative justice narrative: the legal treatment of administrative silence and the alternative dispute resolution tools. The legal fictions associated with administrative silence and the interplay between the two avenues of dispute solving—administrative and judicial—are a persistent preoccupation of the administrative law discourse in modern times. This is even more significant in transitional countries, where the legal tradition was interrupted by political changes and restarted decades later. The chapter seeks to identify and provide a survey of these recurring themes in administrative justice research from the perspective of transitional (former Communist) democracies from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), taken as a case study. It identifies the challenges posed by the administrative silence and by the adoption of ADR tools meant to alleviate the burden from the courts. The chapter concludes that the success of different (sometimes competing) approaches is highly dependent on the legal culture of the system in which they are implemented.