Administrative Law (5402)
Fall 2012

Exam Blog

I will post all questions that I answer for individual students here.

Remember, the exam is closed book and notes.

Warning - do not study the questions on the old exams. The material changes from year to year, and these may contain questions on material we did not cover this year. Stick to the review questions that I have provided for this year.

The exam will be more questions and shorter answers than last year. This should give everyone a better shot by reducing the value of any given missed question.

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The file - Vermont-Yankee-review-questions - is not part of the review question set for the exam. These are the only review questions for the exam:

Review Questions 1&2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; Suing the Government

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> Subject: Official Notice/ Building the Record
>
>          I have finished looking over the power points and was still
> unsuccessful in finding the material relating to "Building the Record" from
> the review questions for Chapter 4. I did, however, finally locate the
> definition of official notice on your website under the glossary of terms. I
> see that it relates to evidence produced for an administrative hearing.
> Could it perhaps be in the chapter on Adjudication (Chapter 3)? Thanks for
> your help.

I usually discuss official notice in relation to the problem of assuring that all of the evidence used by the decisionmaking in an adjudication is preserved in the record for judicial review. It is not clear from my notes whether I specifically discussed this in class this term. Official notice is when the hearing officer relies on a government record or other generally accepted reference for a fact at issue. For example, the hearing officer might admit into evidence the weather report from the national weather service to establish the temperature on a given day. Another example, and one that shows the problems with this, is that the hearing officer might admit a United States Geologic Service report on coastal elevations into evidence. While this is an official government report, it is not a peer reviewed or otherwise validated document. The regulated party might not be allowed to present evidence to rebut the report.

This is related to the problem of the decisionmaker using personal information in the hearing. For example, the physician members of the Board of Medical Examiners might use their own knowledge of medical practice standards in a disciplinary hearing. Unless they document those standards in the record, the court will not be able to review the standards and may have to remand the case for reconsideration by the agency.

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