In our days of a dynamic transformation of the array of the national statutory and regulatory framework aimed at ensuring the stable and efficient implementation of administrative judicial procedure, well-measured use of evaluative concepts in the law administration activities gains paramount significance. And the use of such concepts should be based solely on a science-generated uniform theoretical foundation of evaluative concepts and general theoretical knowledge about them. However, subjects of law administration face certain difficulties with understanding the evaluative concepts and interpreting them, as evidenced by the results of the analysis of judicial practice involving cases within the framework of administrative proceedings, since this practice demonstrates different interpretations of the same provisions, all this having a negative effect on the status of exercise and protection of rights, freedoms and interests of individuals and legal entities in contested relations with subjects of public administration. This article aims at researching into the essence of evaluative concepts, analyzing the evaluative concepts in administrative law (also in procedural law) and formulating their definition. An analysis of scientific approaches has been made in respect of how evaluative concepts are understood in the legal doctrine, and also in respect of the points of view which exist in the administrative law literature with regard to interpretation of such concepts in the administrative procedure law. Thus, it has been established that the legal science has not developed a unified approach to naming the category under study. The pages of legal literature offer the terms “rubber concepts”, “framework definitions”, “abstract concepts”, “highly abstract” and “most difficult”, “relatively defined” and “estimated evaluative concepts” as well as “evaluative categories”. The authors establish that it is more justified to use the term “evaluative concept” since it is more traditional to the modern legal doctrine. The article demonstrates that the meaning of the category “evaluative concepts” is ambivalently revealed in the legal doctrine. Based on the analysis of these approaches, the authors give their definition of a respective category. The authors offer their own version of the definition of “evaluative concepts in administrative judicial procedure” meaning an abstract characteristic of actual or potential facts which is expressed in the administrative procedure provision and which requires concretization each time the said concepts are used within the framework of administrative discretion, for the sake of providing the subject of law administration with the minimum required authority for the maximum attention to the individual features of an administrative case, and for its fair, impartial and timely consideration).

List of legal documents

Legislation

1. Kodeks administratyvnoho sudochynstva Ukrainy [The Code of Administrative Judicial Procedure of Ukraine]: Zakon Ukrainy [Law of Ukraine] vid 6 lypnia 2005 r. № 2747-IV (v redaktsii Zakonu Ukrainy [As Amended by the Law of Ukraine] vid 3 zhovtnia 2017 r. № 2147-VIII). URL: http://zakon0.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2747-15 (accessed: 25.12.2017) (in Ukrainian).

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(dys kand yuryd nauk, Natsionalna akademiia vnutrishnikh sprav 2013) (in Ukrainian).