UCLA School of Law

This is a chapter from the book “Administrative Tribunals in the Common Law World,” edited by Stephen Thomson, Matthew Groves, and Greg Meeks (Hart Publishing 2024). Most English-speaking countries rely on tribunals to conduct administrative adjudication.  A tribunal is a body independent of the government agency that makes the initial decision in disputes between private parties and government that involve administrative regulation or benefit distribution.  The US does not rely primarily on tribunals to provide administrative hearings. Instead, the default system for both federal and state governments is a combined-function design. Under that model, a government agency adopts regulations and distributes benefits or prosecutes violations of the governing statute and regulations. That agency then adjudicates the resulting disputes. Although the US default is the combined-function agency, its administrative adjudication system is quite varied and includes numerous tribunals. This chapter provides a general overview of that system. It also sets out a theoretical approach to agency adjudication to assist the reader in distinguishing between the many design variations found in adjudicatory systems throughout the world, including both the combined-function and tribunal models as well as the administrative court system used in numerous countries.

The chapter then discusses the combined-function agency model. It sets out a typology of three different types of US combined-function adjudication and discusses the US Administrative Procedure Act and the history of combined-function agencies. Finally, it discusses US tribunals. The volume of decisions arising out of administrative adjudication is vastly greater than those resolved by courts. The outcome of most administrative disputes (such as disputes over benefit claims or minor penalties) is not very important to the government, but every one of them is vitally important to the private party who has challenged the government. For these reasons, administrative adjudication is deserving of scholarly attention. Comparative law helps scholars and policymakers to better understand their own administrative adjudicatory systems and furnishes them with ideas for transplanted procedures that might improve those systems.