Administrative or regulatory law is comprised of the various rules and actions that are enacted by administrative bodies such as the Executive Office of the President, the Department of Education or the Securities and Exchange Commission. Agencies have different powers depending on whether or not they are considered executive, legislative or independent.
Rulemaking and decision-making are the main mechanisms through which agencies act. This means the role of administrative agencies is to make rules and enforce or adjudicate them. Administrative rules, also referred to interchangeably as regulations, are adopted by agencies and are considered primary legal authority.
The Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U.S.C. §§551 et. seq. gives the requirements, standards and procedures for rulemaking, hearings and adjudication. Congress makes laws that give agencies the authority to issue and enforce regulations.
Online access to state materials varies widely. Georgetown University Law Library has created state research guides for information about individual jurisdictions.
Administrative agencies are typically charged with enforcing the rules they promulgate. In this enforcement capacity, an agency may issue a variety of formal and informal adjudicative materials, including guidance, opinions, rulings, memoranda, orders, directives, decisions, or arbitrations. When looking into agency actions and regulations, finding out where your agency's decisions are published can be a tricker part of the research process than looking for judicial court decisions. Unlike federal rules, there is no single source for accessing all adjudicative materials, and researchers may need to review a variety of resources to find a particular document, if indeed it was published and made publicly available.
In this section, we will look at publication sources for agency decisions, starting with official publications, subsrciption databases like Lexis & Westlaw, as well as online internet sites.
Here are links to commonly soughsought-aftercies:
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