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First Year Legal Research

What Are Administrative Regulations?

Administrative law is:

  1. The law that administrative agencies create in furtherance of their legislative mandates, as well as
  2. The law that governs how agencies create the laws that further their legislative mandate.

The laws that administrative agencies make are called regulations. Both federal administrative agencies and state administrative agencies write regulations, empowered to do so through authority delegated by the federal or state legislature. The statutory authority that empowers an agency to create a regulation can be found in that regulation’s Authority Note.

Agencies are often responsible for implementing statutes; accordingly, when researching and working with statutes, it is important to consult any regulations that implement those statutes. Agencies may only enact regulations when delegated to do so by the legislature. A legislature may delegate authority to an administrative agency for a variety of reasons:

  • Agencies are staffed with subject-matter experts who have the knowledge necessary to effectively implement statutes.
  • Agencies may act more quickly than the legislature, so they are better equipped to implement law or policy that was passed by the legislature. 
  • Within agencies, non-political positions provide consistency in implementing regulations since employees will serve across administrations.

Regulations that currently are in force are published in regulatory codes, which are organized by subject. There is a regulatory code for federal regulations; each state has its own unique regulatory code.

The Code of Federal Regulations

The federal regulatory code is called the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.). The C.F.R. is organized into 50 broad topics, called “Titles.” Titles are divided further into chapters, chapters are divided into subchapters, subchapters are divided into parts, and parts are divided into subparts.

Federal regulations are identified by their title and section number. For example:

  • 7 C.F.R. § 318.13-17 is the citation for an agricultural regulation regarding cut flowers from Hawaii.
    • "7" stands for title 7, which contains the agricultural regulations, and "318.13-17" is the section within that title.

Federal regulations are first published in the Federal Register, which is published every day the federal government is open. The Federal Register contains the text of proposed and final 

    • rules, as well as executive orders and other executive information. The Federal Register is a helpful resource for conducting research regarding why agencies are creating new—or amending existing—regulations.

Finalized regulations are organized by subject into the C.F.R. The C.F.R. is available:

State regulations are published in comparable publications. A register will likely be the first place you should look to find a regulation. Compilations of regulations, organized by subject, will appear in a regulatory code. Check the Bluebook Whitepages Table T1.3 for information regarding state-level administrative law publications.

Searching for Regulations

Searching for regulations is comparable to searching for statutes. The techniques discussed in the Statutes section of this guide can also be applied to searching the regulatory codes. Regulatory codes, like statutory codes, have print and online indexes. Keyword searching and table of contents browsing also work similarly for regulations as for statutes.

There are many other paths to identifying whether your legal issue has related regulations:

  • Statutory annotations can be used to see if any related regulations are identified. As regulations often supplement statutes, regulatory citations are commonly found in the history notes and annotations for statutes.
  • Directly from the agency's website or other government websites, such as federalregister.gov.
  • A secondary source may direct you to relevant regulations and will often compile important administrative decisions.

The most direct path to locating regulations implementing a statute:

  • While viewing the statute, select the Context & Analysis tab, and select Code of Federal Regulations.
  • If no regulations are cited, either select the Citing References tab to see if any regulations cite the statute (in its Authority Note) or try Context & Analysis tab again, this time in the definitions section.
  • You can find editorially-selected cases that have interpreted your regulation (or the entire part that contains your regulation) under the Notes of Decisions tab. All citing cases can be identified by using the Citing References tab, and making the appropriate limits.

The most direct path to locating regulations implementing a statute:

  • While viewing the statute, select Find references to this code under the Related Content heading on the right side of the screen. A new page should open.
    • On the right side of the screen, select More. Then select Administrative Codes and Regulations.
    • Under Administrative Codes and Regulations, select the box for Administrative Codes.
    • Under Jurisdiction, select the box for U.S. Federal.
  • You can find editorially-selected cases that have interpreted your regulation (or the entire part that contains your regulation) under Annotations > Notes to Decisions at the end of the text of the regulations.
  • If no regulations are cited, try Shepardizing the statute to see if any regulations cite the statute (in its Authority Note). 

The value of HeinOnline for federal regulatory research is that it offers the full run of the Federal Register (beginning 1936) and the Code of Federal Regulations (beginning in 1938) in PDF format. This resource is ideal for historical research with known citations.

  • federalregister.gov: a free unofficial version of the Federal Register with robust search/filtering capabilities and links to the official version of the Federal Register. 

  • e-CFR (http://www.ecfr.gov): a free, yet unofficial, version of the C.F.R. that is just as current as what you will find on Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg Law. It links to notices in the Federal Register to alert you to forthcoming changes. 

  • govinfo.gov: a website that allows you to locate authenticated PDFs of regulations. 

  • regulations.gov: a website that is utilized by some federal agencies to make their rulemaking more accessible to the public. It is most helpful for finding comments submitted by the public for proposed rules. 

  • Agency websites will usually contain agency's regulations, the text of administrative decisions (if the agency issues them), and informal guidance documents. While guidance documents may not be binding, they are important research tools as they reflect the agency’s understanding of a given issue. Compliance guidance may be particularly valuable. 

Validating Your Research

As with both statutes and cases, you need to validate your research to confirm that your regulation is still good law. The citators in electronic research platforms (KeyCite in Westlaw and Shepard's in Lexis) can be used to validate regulations, in the same way that they are used to validate statutes and cases. 

Regulations can be invalidated, limited, or modified in one of two ways: 

  1. The agency can change the text of a regulation or rescind it entirely.     
    • For example, a new executive’s administration may have different priorities, or the legislature could change or rescind the legislation to which the regulations apply.
    • This would be an administrative change to the regulation.
    • The e-CFR and Govinfo.gov are free tools to help you update a regulation.
    • Prior to revision or rescission, the administrative agency will need to publish the proposed changes in the Federal Register. 
  2. A court could determine that an agency has exceeded its delegated authority in promulgating the regulation and render it invalid.
    • This would be a judicial reason for the regulation no longer being good law.
    • Courts may also interpret regulations in a manner that limits their scope or expound upon their meaning.
    • KeyCite and Shepard's are the best tools to assist with judicial updating. 

Additional Administrative Law Research Guides