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Judicial Federalism and the Administrative States |
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| Federal courts are reluctant to review the
work of state and local administrative agencies.
Despite the presence of diversity or federal
question jurisdiction to challenge final agency
action, federal courts have sometimes abstained
from exercising their jurisdiction out of fear of
disrupting a complex regulatory scheme and
displacing state courts in the uniform
development of state regulatory policy. At other
times, federal courts have treated review of
state administrative action as "appellate"
in nature and therefore beyond the jurisdiction
of the federal district courts, especially when
review of agency action would be deferential
under state law. And at still other times,
federal courts have invoked preclusion principles
to bar federal challenges to agency action that
was judicial in nature. While recent decisions of
the Supreme Court may have moved away from
imposing a jurisdictional bar, the American Law
Institute proposes to revive such a limit,
arguing that such review of agency action is
contrary to the historic role of the federal
courts and would alter their essential function
as courts of original jurisdiction. In this Article, Professors Woolhandler and Collins challenge these various practices preventing review of nonfederal administrative action, and they question the rationales behind them. They argue that, as a historical matter, federal courts once engaged in a robust review of state administrative action, even as to issues of state law. In addition, they suggest that concern for federal court interference with uniformity of state policy making has been overstated, while traditional concerns of federal jurisdictional policy in providing a neutral forum for out of staters as well as those raising federal challenges to state and local action, have been slighted. They also attack the characterization of judicial review of administrative action as appellate, and suggest why it is both descriptively accurate and normatively desirable to see judicial review as an original proceeding distinct from agency action. And in many cases, they observe, according state agency decision making the same level of deference that it would obtain in a state court would serve as a better measure of the respect owed such decision making than formal preclusion. Although the Article takes the position that federal courts should not shy from entertaining diversity-based challenges to state administrative decision making, or even most challenges grounded in federal law, it concludes that, absent diversity, due process reasonableness challenges to agency action should ordinarily be relegated to state courts. |
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Copyright
© 1999 by California Law Review, Inc. |
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