Tragically, half of the law students in the US graduate without taking Administrative law, which is rarely a required course. Many, many of them are sorry later.

Of the courses I teach, it’s Administrative Law that students most frequently come back years later and thank me for.

Yes, it’s a very hard subject. Yes, it’s not on the bar exam. But you need it.

Administrative Law is rarely oversubscribed in any law school. Sign up now.

The headline is actually slightly unfair, at least as to the constitutional rights part, but it’s still funny.

Someone writing about the Administrative Procedure Act? In the holidays? What fun!

But no, it’s about the American Philosophical Association job fair. Which, incidentally, sounds much worse than the AALS’s version.

The statute doesn’t explain who takes over if the 210+ day period lapses — I presume it’s the next in line for the job, (unless the President designates someone else).

(a) Except in the case of a vacancy caused by sickness, the person serving as an acting officer as described under section 3345 may serve in the office -

(1) for no longer than 210 days beginning on the date the vacancy occurs; or (2) subject to subsection (b), once a first or second nomination for the office is submitted to the Senate, from the date of such nomination for the period that the nomination is pending in the Senate.

(b)(1) If the first nomination for the office is rejected by the Senate, withdrawn, or returned to the President by the Senate, the person may continue to serve as the acting officer for no more than 210 days after the date of such rejection, withdrawal, or return.

(2) Notwithstanding paragraph (1), if a second nomination for the office is submitted to the Senate after the rejection, withdrawal, or return of the first nomination, the person serving as the acting officer may continue to serve -

(A) until the second nomination is confirmed; or (B) for no more than 210 days after the second nomination is rejected, withdrawn, or returned.

(c) If a vacancy occurs during an adjournment of the Congress sine die, the 210-day period under subsection (a) shall begin on the date that the Senate first reconvenes.

Hard-core separation of powers dorks will want to take a look at Doolin Security Savings Bank v. Office of Thrift Supervision 139 F.3d 203 & 156 F.3d 190, wherein among other fascinating things, a diverse panel of the DC Circuit agrees unanimously that the head of the Office of Thrift Supervision is an “Officer of the United States” and that the 210 day clock starts when an acting person starts in on his job and not when the vacancy occurs.

(Adlaw mavens may be startled at the discussion of harmless error in a separation of powers case. I was.)

The perfect topic for a blog IMHO, but very very hard to pull off.

It’s one of the great fetishes of US law that triers of fact, be they juries, judges, or administrative officials (including ALJs and Immigration Judges), deserve deference for their credibility determinations as they saw the live witness and the reviewer of the cold record did not. We don’t question jury determinations — they’re a black box, and juries are not called upon to give reasons for their decisions as to who to believe. The same is not true, however, of either judges or administrators. We expect them to issue reasoned opinions, and call foul when they fail to and when the reasons they give fail to hold water.

Indeed, one of the puzzles of administrative law is the so-called Universal Camera problem — suppose that an initial trier of fact reached one decision on the evidence but that the higher-ups in the agency appeals process reached an opposite conclusion. When the matter goes to the court of appeals, what weight should the court put on the trier’s views? The issue implicates two competing values in administrative law: on the one hand the great deference to the front-line assessment of credibility, on the other hand the command in the Administrative Procedure Act that the agency, in deciding a matter, has full power to determine it (i.e. that its hands are not tied by lower-level officials). It’s very hard for both of these to be true at once: if we give weight to demeanor then the front-line official has de facto power to limit the decisions of his/her bosses. If on the other hand we don’t give any extra credence to the factual findings of the person who actually received the evidence, we’ve undermined an ancient principle of Anglo-American jurisprudence. We square that circle by saying that the trier’s decision is part of the record that binds the agency. So it’s free to make any decision, but its decision must be based on the record. The trier, we say only somewhat convincingly, hasn’t bound the agency, he’s just made part of the record.

The fact that she was testifying through an interpreter has a significance that my colleagues do not appreciate when they say that “The IJ spent 6 hours in a hearingroom, face to face, with Ms. Apouviepseakoda. We have never met her.” I take this to be an allusion to the common though not necessarily correct belief that being present when a witness testifies greatly assists a judge or juror in determining whether the witness is telling the truth. Even if so in general, it cannot be so when the witness is a foreigner testifying through an interpreter, especially if the judge cannot even hear the foreigner, but only the interpreter. Reading the facial expressions or body language of a foreigner for signs of lying is not a skill that either we or Judge Brahos possess.

We understand the dilemma facing immigration judges in asylum cases. The applicant for asylum normally bases his claim almost entirely on his own testimony, and it is extremely difficult for the judge to determine whether the testimony is accurate. Often it is given through a translator, and even if the applicant testifies in English, as a foreigner his demeanor will be difficult for the immigration judge to “read” as an aid to determining the applicant’s credibility. Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, which share responsibility for processing asylum claims, have, so far as appears, failed to provide the immigration judges and the members of the Board of Immigration Appeals with any systematic guidance on the resolution of credibility issues in these cases. The departments have not conducted studies of patterns of true and false representations made by such applicants, of sources of corroboration and refutation, or of the actual consequences to asylum applicants who are denied asylum and removed to the country that they claim will persecute them. Without such systematic evidence (which the State Department’s country reports on human rights violations, though useful, do not provide), immigration judges are likely to continue grasping at straws—minor contradictions that prove nothing, absence of documents that may in fact be unavailable in the applicant’s country or to an asylum applicant, and patterns of behavior that would indeed be anomalous in the conditions prevailing in the United States but may not be in Third World countries—in an effort to avoid giving all asylum applicants a free pass. The departments seem committed to case by case adjudication in circumstances in which a lack of background knowledge denies the adjudicators the cultural competence required to make reliable determinations of credibility.

We close by noting six disturbing features of the handling of this case that bulk large in the immigration cases that we are seeing:

…

4. Insensitivity to the possibility of misunderstandings caused by the use of translators of difficult languages such as Chinese, and relatedly, insensitivity to the difficulty of basing a determination of credibility on the demeanor of a person from a culture remote from the American, such as the Chinese. E.g., Lin v. Ashcroft, 385 F.3d 748, 756 n. 1 (7th Cir.2004); Ememe v. Ashcroft, 358 F.3d 446, 451-53 (7th Cir.2004); Mendoza Manimbao v. Ashcroft, 329 F.3d 655, 662 (9th Cir.2003); He v. Ashcroft, 328 F.3d 593, 598 (9th Cir.2003); Deborah E. Anker, “Determining Asylum Claims in the United States: A Case Study on the Implementation of Legal Norms in an Unstructured Adjudicatory Environment,” 19 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Social Change 433, 505-27 (1992); Neal P. Pfeiffer, “Credibility Findings in INS Asylum Adjudications: A Realistic Assessment,” 23 Tex. Int’l L.J. 139 (1988). Behaviors that in our culture are considered evidence of unreliability, such as refusing to look a person in the eyes when he is talking to you, are in Asian cultures a sign of respect.

This issue of demeanor in translation (and the implications for deference on appeal) seems like an important question. There must be a good student note or two in here somewhere.

But even the pressures of the job don’t excuse the conduct documented in Apouviepseakoda v. Gonzales, 05-3752 (7th Cir., Feb. 2, 2007). Nor, given that the Seventh Circuit has all the time it wants to reach a decision, does it excuse the majority decision to defer to an arbitrary and capricious decision. Judge Posner’s dissent is far more persuasive than Judge Evans for the majority — although Posner here fails to persuade Judge Easterbrook, who is the third vote.

Posner points up errors of logic, and notes a judicial demeanor from hell, which together suggest that this was not a fair hearing. The best the majority can say is that the decision, although “odd” is not “so deeply flawed” as to be reversible. If we take it at face value, this looks like the rare case which turned on how deferential a reviewing court should be. But one could be forgiven for reading it as showing a great reluctance on the part of some judges to admit just how bad things are in some IJ’s hearing rooms, for to do so would be to open the floodgates to immigration petitions and reversals.

Seacost is famous for holding that the words "public hearing" in a statute triggered formal adjudication under sec. 554 of the APA. The idea was that if the issues were sufficiently important, Congress should be understood to have assumed that the agency should use the cumbersome full-dress procedures of an on-the-record adjudication. This was not as strange as it may sound to modern ears, as it followed the influential Attorney General's Manual on the APA.

Other circuits, however, took a different tack, especially after the landmark case of Chevron v. United States. Those courts held that unless Congress explicitly instructed the agency to hold a "formal" hearing (most commonly by saying that the hearing should be "on the record") the agency could in most cases choose to proceed by the less onerous, although still quite formalized, "informal" rulemaking process.

That makes the Ninth Circuit the sole remaining outlier, based on Marathon Oil Co. v. EPA, 564 F.2d 1263 (9th Cir. 1977). That rule is probably doomed too.

Blogged in part because I like all-acronym titles.

Public Knowledge is pleased to announce that The U.S. Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit this morning threw out the Federal Communications Commission’s order establishing the so-called “broadcast flag.” In a unanimous opinion, the court agreed with our argument that the FCC exceeded its authority in creating this broadcast flag scheme. Judge Harry T. Edwards, writing for the court, said: “In the seven decades of its existence, the FCC has never before asserted such sweeping authority. Indeed, in the past, the FCC has informed Congress that it lacked any such authority. In our view, nothing has changed to give the FCC the authority it now claims.” This was a case that Public Knowledge organized and financed. We’re still looking for help to pay for the case, so please take the opportunity, if you haven’t, contribute to PK or become a member. It’s easy. See here: http://www.publicknowledge.org/membership-drive-200504.

We couldn’t have done it without the help of our co-plaintiffs, Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, American Association of Law Libraries, Medical Library Association and the Special Libraries Association.