Administrative Law

Administrative law is something I was first introduced to in my government documents class, and later in my work as a law library assistant. In my class it was presented as the "invisible fourth branch," an apt term for an area of law I thought, as I had really never heard anything about it before. By the time of reading the Rowe text, I had already gained an understanding of the basics of administrative law, at least on a federal level, knowing for instance that administrative agencies are usually established by a legislature in codified statutes (some might be established by the Constitution). This allows them to create rules and orders that carry out the programs outlined in an enabling statutes in the necessarily detailed and practical fashion not possible in the statutes alone.

Rules are comparable to statutes, and orders are comparable to case decisions. In other words, an agency acts like both a legislature and a judicial system within its own boundaries, but exists as part of the executive branch. Rowe points out that rules are subordinate to statutes, and orders may be appealed to the Oregon Court of Appeals (outside the agency's internal and quasi-judicial agency review procedure.

Oregon's compilation of administrative rules, the Oregon Administrative Rules Compilation or OAR, is neither as extensive nor indexed as federal rules are in the Code of Federal Regulations. Rowe notes, and I agree from my law library experience, that without a print index and instead only a table of contents, OARs are more easily searched online at the Oregon Secretary of State's website http://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/banners/rules.htm. While I was familiar with theFederal Register as a publication for proposed and new rules as well as agency hearings, I was unaware of Oregon's equivalent, the Oregon Bulletin. Orders are generally found with the agency's publications themselves, and some are easier to obtain than others.

Researching rules is fairly similar to researching statutes, except that the researcher usually starts with the enabling statute and any relevant case law. Next is the reading of the rule's text itself, and then using the Bulletin to discover if there are any updates or proposed changes to the rule. Finally the researcher would search for any related agency or judicial decisions applying the rule in similar circumstances.

A big revelation in this chapter for me was the explanation of the position of the state Attorney General as the state's lawyer; I had not really had a clear idea of what exactly an attorney general was before. Thinking of the position as the legal counsel for the state finally gave me a better idea of what exactly the Opinions of the Attorney General of the State of Oregon is - a collection of formal and informal responses to questions posed by the Governor, agency officials, or legislators that constitute legal advice.