How Federal and Maryland Courts Review Administrative Agency Actions
John R. Grimm & Landyn Wm. Rookard
Judicial review of administrative agency decisions is an important topic in the fields of both administrative and appellate law. Any significant agency action is likely to be tested in court, so judicial review is often an unofficial necessity before a new regulation or adjudicative decision can truly be considered “settled law.”1 The applicable standards of review in an eventual appeal also influence how an agency must approach its decision-making. One might expect fairly uniform standards and procedures for appellate review of an agency action, just as there are for appeals of trial court decisions.
Procedurally, however, an administrative appeal is a fundamentally different creature from a judicial appeal. Indeed, an administrative appeal is not even a true “appeal,” but rather an action invoking a court’s original jurisdiction.2 Moreover, while an appeal of a trial court’s ruling involves a superior tribunal reviewing the decision of an inferior one within the same branch of government, a court reviewing an agency’s decision sits in judgment of the policy decisions of a coordinate branch of government and is constrained by separation-of-powers principles.
Federal and Maryland law treat administrative appeals similarly— except when they don’t. And their differences are notable.3 For instance, Maryland courts possess a significant measure of the autonomy that federal courts arguably lack: Congress (along with the federal courts themselves) has shielded several small but important categories of agency acts from federal court review, whereas Maryland courts have held that the legislature cannot divest courts of their inherent authority to review even “unreviewable” agency acts.4 Likewise, federal review is often characterized by a significant and robust set of deference principles that courts must adhere to. While Maryland courts defer to agencies as well, it is more a matter of comity than judicial restraint, and courts always retain the final word on the law they are reviewing.5
The scholarly treatment of federal administrative law has been, to put it mildly, extensive. But even though state regulation is “no less important” than federal regulation,6 the regulatory review procedures of Maryland (and other states) receive far less attention. Maryland,7 like the federal system,8 has well-developed judicial-review principles governed by an administrative procedure act (“APA”), the Maryland Rules, and an extensive body of case law.9
The purpose of this Article is to provide a basic analysis of the ways both federal and Maryland courts review the actions of administrative agencies. The landscape of administrative law is vast, and this Article is focused on one small but important corner of that landscape. It describes the judicial review process under each system, and examines some important similarities and distinctions between federal and Maryland regulatory appellate practice, particularly in light of recent decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States and the Court of Appeals of Maryland.10
The natural question raised by this examination is how these two systems differ in actual operation. The surprising—and unsatisfying— answer is that it is difficult to say for sure. The vernacular of administrative law is filled with capacious terms like “arbitrary,” “capricious,” “excess,” or “unlawful,” to which it is impossible to assign concrete values.11 This means similar-sounding concepts may actually be dissimilar. For example, Maryland and federal courts both examine whether certain agency actions were “arbitrary or capricious,” but as we will see, the way they frame that analysis varies appreciably. While we highlight conceptual differences between the two systems, we do not attempt to predict where they would or would not lead to different results. That important empirical question—if it can be answered—is worthy of further exploration.12
We start in Part I by introducing the foundational rulemaking– adjudication dichotomy that heavily influences the trajectory of judicial review. Part II then draws out the nuances of when and in what form judicial review is available for agency actions. Part III identifies key distinctions in how the courts in each jurisdiction exercise their substantive review of an agency’s legal interpretation. Finally, Part IV describes the methods of invoking judicial review in the Maryland and federal systems.