The Legal Approach to Public Administration
Origins and Values In the United States, the legal approach to public administration has historically been eclipsed by the other approaches, especially the managerial. Nevertheless, it has a venerable tradition and has recently emerged as a full-fledged vehicle for defining public administration. It is derived primarily from three interrelated sources. First is administrative law. As early as 1905, Frank Goodnow, a leading contributor to the development of public administrative theory generally, published a book entitled The Principles of the Administrative Law of the Unitedstates. There he defined administrative law as "that part of the law which fixes the organization and determines the competence ofthe authorities which execute the law, and indicates to the individual remedies 41 for the violation of his rights Others have found this broad conception of administrative law adequate for defining much of the work of public administrators and the nature of public agencies. For instance, Marshall Dimock writes: