Abstract: The subject of the article is the range of problems of legal and theoretical understanding of service law as a structural element of the system of administrative law. The author summarizes the results of a scientific discussion about service law and concludes that service law is not a sub-branch of administrative law; public service is still one of the fundamental institutions of administrative law. The author analyzes the concepts of service law from the position of administrative-legal regulation of employer-employee relations in Russia. The article presents the author’s positions on the public service concept. The main attention is paid to the development of methodology of administrative-legal regulation of employer-employee relations. The methodological base comprises the recent achievements of epistemology. The author applies the general philosophical and theoretical methods (dialectics, the systems approach, analysis, synthesis, analogy, deduction, observation and modeling), the traditional-legal methods (formal-logical), and special sociological methods (the statistical methods, expert assessments, etc.). The author concludes that at present there are no grounds for service law formation. The author substantiates the conclusion that service law is not a sub-branch of administrative law, and public service is still one of the fundamental institutions of administrative law. The novelty of the research lies in the suggestions about the theory and the system of administrative law development.