Employee discretion—The mother of all discretions

Abstract

The legal order is not the biological system and cannot be self-sustained; we must rely mainly on officials who sustain it. The paper gives the basic descriptive elements of employee discretion and shows its modus operandi in public institutions. Employee discretion as the mixture of care, generalisation and legal protection is one of the legal state’s cornerstones and represents the constant source of order to sustain the latter’s structure and the quality of (each) government. With the understanding of behaviour of complex adaptive systems, employee discretion can be more fully described, while for its better prediction, digital-era governance is needed in connection with co-production. The paper gives through the elaboration of employee discretion the additional argument for the importance of co-production and based on that gives future paths also for legal science.