Administrative Law Commons^™

Introduction: The doctrine of issue exhaustion generally bars a litigant challenging agency action from raising issues in court that were not raised first with the agency. Although the doctrine originated in the context of agency adjudication, it has been extended to judicial review of challenges to agency rulemakings. Scholars have observed that issue exhaustion cases "conspicuously lack discussion of whether, when, why, or how [the issue] exhaustion doctrine developed in the context of adjudication should be applied to rulemaking." 1. The Administrative Conference has studied the issue exhaustion doctrine in an effort to bring greater clarity to its application in …

The classic version of the exhaustion-of-remedies requirement generally requires a party to go through all the stages of an administrative adjudication before going to court.  However, the doctrine has developed a new permutation, covering situations where a petitioner for judicial review did follow all the steps of the administrative appeals process, but had failed to raise in that process the issues now sought to be litigated in court.  In those cases, which have been called “issue exhaustion” cases, the thwarted petitioner will likely be out of luck since normally there is no further opportunity to raise the issue at the …

The 1998 Amendments to the Higher Education Act requires that, absent good cause for not doing so, the U.S. Department of Education (“ED”) promulgate all subsequent higher education regulations through a negotiated rulemaking process.  The Act contains detailed consultation requirements and is quite prescriptive concerning the selection of members of the negotiating committee, which is tasked with seeing consensus on the text of a proposed rule (that is then subjected to the regular notice-and-comment rulemaking process).  In addition, ED rulemaking is subject to a statutory 360-day deadline, and any final rules containing regulatory changes must be published by November 1 …

Introduction: As the ADR movement made its way from the courts to the agency hearing rooms in the 1980s, negotiated rulemaking (sometimes called "regulatory negotiation" or simply "reg-neg") also emerged on a parallel track as an alternative to traditional procedures for drafting proposed regulations. This exemplar of regulatory reform was based on two insights: (1) that the usual process of written notice-and-comment rulemaking has an intrinsic weakness because stakeholders engaged in it do not interact with each other or with the agency; and (2) in certain situations, it is possible to bring together representatives of the agency and the various …

Introduction: In President Bush's first press conference after the bitter 2004 election, he remarked:"With the campaign over,Americans are expecting a bipartisan effort and results." l He also commented that," [O]ne of the disappointments of being here in Washington is how bitter this town can become and how divisive. I'm not blaming one party or the other. It's just the reality of Washington, D.C ... It also makes it difficult to govern at times."2 The President actually took a first step to promoting bipartisanship and reducing bitterness in Washington a few days before the election on October 30, 2004, by signing …

For many years, Congress has had various bills before it to create alternatives to the current practice of Article III review (in district courts) of Social Security disability cases. This report, prepared initially for the Social Security Advisory Board, reviews the various legislative proposals and statutory alternatives such as the Veterans Administration administrative/judicial review structure. It concludes that, on balance, review before an Article I court (with Court of Appeals review limited to purely legal issues) has numerous advantages over the present system. These advantages include improvements in the accuracy and consistency of results (the federal district courts have vastly …