Administrative Adjudication

The US system of administrative adjudication in which our federal agencies decide disputes with private parties themselves with administrative hearings, with an internal appeal, followed by judicial review based on the administrative record in the federal courts is familiar to American lawyers. But that is not the system that is followed by most countries around the world—where agency decisions are typically made in a very informal manner, with any requested hearings taking place in administrative courts or tribunals and sometimes with further review in the ‘regular’ courts. This dichotomy between the US system of internal administrative adjudication and external administrative adjudication around the world reveals that the United States is the outlier. This chapter describes this dichotomy in more detail and examines its implication in terms of administrative justice and other qualitative measures of the different models.