The Rights of Citizens in Krbek's Doctrine of Administrative Law
Abstract
The subject of the paper is the scientific activity of the professor of administrative law Ivo Krbek from the beginning of his scientific work in the early 1920s until the end of his scientific career in the 1960s in the part related to the rights of citizens. The aim of the paper is to establish the basic tenets of Krbek's doctrine on the rights of citizens and to determine any changes and adjustments of attitudes during his forty-year scientific career. The analysis of Krbek's work is divided into three time periods: the interwar period, his activities during World War II and his activities after World War II. Within the interwar period, the books on administrative law from 1929 and 1932, the book on discretionary assessment from 1937 and the book on self-government from 1939 are analysed as particularly important. In the analysis of the activities during World War II, the material on national liberation committees proved to be essential for the analysis. Krbek's scientific activity in the field of citizens' rights in the period after World War II is analyzed on the basis of an article on citizens' rights from 1948 and chapters in books on administrative law that Krbek wrote during the 1950s and early 1960s. The author establishes in the paper that during the second half of the 1930s Ivo Krbek abandoned the liberal doctrine regarding citizens' rights, that he relativized the concept of subjective rights and that he accepted the idea of objective legality as the main purpose of the legal order. The author points to the fact that Krbek already then emphasized the importance of taking greater account of general social interests as opposed to individual rights and interests of citizens. The author shows in the paper that Krbek further radicalized these positions after World War II when, in accordance with socialist understandings, he made citizens' rights dependent on duties and on the general social interests of the socialist community.
