Earlier this week over at Jotwell, I reviewed Emily Bremer‘s terrific new article The Rediscovered Stages of Agency Adjudication, which is forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review. Here’s the intro to that review:

A couple years ago, Melissa Wasserman and I charted the new and old worlds of formal agency adjudication. The old world, we explained, consisted of the traditional formal adjudication framework under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), with a trial-like hearing before an administrative law judge (ALJ). Drawing on the work of Michael Asimow, Kent Barnett, and others, we explained that the new world is more diverse and varied. Hearings do not take place just before the nearly 2,000 ALJs in the federal system, but also before more than 10,000 administrative judges, hearing officers, and examiners who are not governed by the APA’s formal provisions. We argued that, in both the old and new world, agency head final-decisionmaking authority remains the standard (and preferred) model—something the Supreme Court in United States v. Arthrex seemed to suggest may be constitutionally required earlier this year.

Another way to conceptualize the old and new worlds is that there is a type—or mode—of agency adjudication (Type B) between the APA’s “formal” (Type A) and “informal” (Type C) modes. In recent years, much scholarly inquiry has focused on the distinctions between Type A and Type B, including an entire issue of the Duke Law Journal. Despite this sustained attention, it turns out that our understanding of adjudication under the APA may be based on a historical misunderstanding. In The Rediscovered Stages of Agency Adjudication, Emily Bremer examines the historical record and concludes that, at the APA’s founding, “informal and formal adjudication were not viewed as alternative modes, but rather as consecutive stages.” It is not often that an article requires a field to fundamentally reconsider its foundations. Yet, Bremer’s Rediscovered Stages is such an article for administrative law (and agency adjudication in particular).

You can read the full review here, and a draft of Bremer’s paper is here.