Of the many approaches, the image of a sustainable state and society is the most essential for us. One of our main objectives is to examine whether law (including legislation, codification, major branches of law, and individual relevant areas of law) can serve as a tool for a sustainable state and society, and in what way. One of the broadest areas of the operation of a sustainable state and society is public administration itself. The idea of a stateless society emerging in certain political actors, the increasingly anarchic international relations, the increasingly escalating cross-border military conflicts may remind us of the fact of the withering away of the state, whether due to cataclysms or internal crises triggered by civil wars or pandemics. Adaptation and resilience can therefore be enhanced by taking good practices into account. Resilience means the adaptability of law. However, this is not a given, and perhaps not even the most characteristic feature of law. Gábor Vladár (1881-1972) said that law lags behind life, and that the deviation of law from life due to rigid, sometimes practice-retarded rules is a given.3

Research based on the examination of the international environment should examine to what extent the instruments of law can promote domestic and international development. The question in this formula is the role and relationship of administrative law, environmental law, and sustainability law. The role of the emerging sustainability law, which has not yet been sufficiently defined, as a branch of law and legal regime, as an adaptive, dialogue-affirming and resilient type of legal field, must be taken into account. At the same time, sustainability cannot be interpreted today solely as a concept related to environmental science or environmental law. Experience shows that sustainability takes on new shades of meaning in the legislation of individual nations. Resilience, as the responsiveness and reaction capacity of law, obviously appears more strongly as a question on the intellectual horizon of societies in the era of the ‘polycrisis.’ The crisis complex simultaneously carries the anxiety of a nuclear attack, the (re-) emergence of a pandemic, the challenge of war, a special military operation launched by one of the nuclear powers, the humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by international terrorism, as well as the challenges of the migrant and refugee crisis, and the serious problems of coexistence of different national and religious cultures in metropolitan conditions, mainly in highly developed Western societies. All this is compounded by the hunger affecting some states of the second largest continent in terms of size and population, the conflict caused by civil wars drawn with a ruler, disregarding the location of various ethnic groups or the specificities of tribal rights, and the series of recurring world economic crises in oil, gasoline, ore, energy carriers, and raw materials. At the same time, the role of various ideologies is not declining either, which often only further inflame existing conflicts. The question is to what extent the specific dogmatic system of law is suitable for answering new problems, although it undoubtedly cannot be ignored and can hardly be replaced by other means, just as its weight is far greater in resolving legal issues than any empirical database, legal mapping, or qualitative or quantitative case study based on non-legal dogma. Despite some minor or major dogmatic errors, in a crisis, the official contract can represent a kind of solution in employment or other issues supported by the state. The electronic contract, or the conclusion of a contract between distant parties, as an innovative technique, is perhaps less relevant in the case of this type of contract, despite today’s level of technical development. (An official contract concluded verbally can be rejected due to the nature of the transaction).4

In any case, an overly extended ‘world law’ regulation that absorbs the law of nations can be just as problematic as the emptying of law. The establishment of a world government (world governance)5 or, as its opposite, the elimination (‘withering away’) of states, or sovereignty placed in the hands of global economic corporations instead of nations, could even seal the fate of humanity. Alternative approaches to solving existing problems are possible. The state, public administration, public administration contracts, and authority contracts do play an essential role.6