UCLA School of Law

Federal administrative agencies conduct a vast number of evidentiary hearings outside the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). These non-APA evidentiary hearings have often been described as “informal adjudication” and assumed to be procedurally unprotected. This picture is false. Evidentiary hearings outside the APA are not “informal adjudication.” Indeed, many of them are quite as formal, and often more formal, than APA hearings. They are surrounded by ample procedural protections provided by regulations and differ from APA hearings only because they are presided over by administrative judges (AJs) rather than administrative law judges (ALJs). The three-fold mission of this article is to persuade the reader to stop calling non-APA evidentiary hearings “informal adjudication,” to bring into focus the rich network of protections for such hearings provided by procedural regulations, and to provide a catalog of best practices for such regulations.