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1L Legal Research - 2022-2023

Administrative Law Overview

What are Administrative Regulations?

Administrative law is:

  • The law that agencies create in furtherance of their legislative mandate.
  • The law that governs how agencies create the laws that further their legislative mandate. An example of this second law is the federal Administrative Procedures Act (A.P.A.).

Laws made by administrative agencies are called regulations. All regulations exist because an agency was delegated authority to write the regulations. That authority can come from the legislature in the form of statutes or from the executive in the form of executive orders. This information is found in the regulation's Authority Note.

Agencies often are responsible for administering certain statutes. Accordingly, when working with statutes, there can be regulations that provide additional guidance regarding those statutes. Agencies also enact other regulations when delegated to so by the legislature.

Regulations that are currently in force are published in regulatory codes, which are organized by subject. There is a regulatory code for federal regulations and a different code for each state.

Where are administrative regulations available?

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, divided further into chapters, subchapters, parts, and subparts. Federal regulations are identified by their title and section number. For example, 7 C.F.R. § 318.13-22 is the cite for an agricultural regulation regarding bananas from Hawaii. "7" stands for title 7, which are the agricultural regulations, and "318.13-22" 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, among other executive information. Because the Federal Register includes an explanatory preamble, it is helpful for conducting research into why agencies are creating new, or amending existing, regulations.
  • Those regulations of a general and permanent nature are then organized by subject into the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.).

The C.F.R. is available in print on the main level of the Law Library; in online subscription services including Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg Law; and freely available online through the eCFR.  The eCFR is not an official version of the C.F.R., but it does provide the most up to date version of the federal regulations currently in force.

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

Searching in the Regulations

Searching for regulations is comparable to searching for statutes. The techniques discussed in this guide in the Statutes: Searching in the Codes section 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 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 website 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 Research References & Practice Aids from the Go to... drop down menu.
  • If no regulations are cited, either try this again with the definitions section, or Shepardize the statute to see if any regulations cite the statute (in its Authority Note).
  • You can find editorially-selected cases that have interpreted your regulation (or the entire part that contains your regulation) under Case Notes at the end of the text of the regulations. All citing cases can be identified by Shepardizing the regulation, and then making the appropriate limits.

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 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; 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 the Federal Register and the C.F.R.
  • regulations.gov: a website that is utilized by some federal agencies to make their rulemakings more accessible to the public; 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 are not law, they are very important for regulated entities to know about and comply with.

Validating Your Research

The continuing validity of a regulation can be affected in one of two ways:

  • First, the agency can change the text of a regulation or rescind it entirely. This would be an administrative change to the regulation. The e-CFR and FDSys are free tools to help you update a regulation.
  • Second, a court could determine that an agency has exceeded its delegated authority in promulgating the regulation and, therefore, render it invalid. This would be a judicial reason for the regulation no longer being good law. KeyCite and Shepard's are the best tools to assist with judicial updating.

As with both statutes and cases, you need to validate your research to confirm that your regulation is still good law. The citators -- KeyCite in Westlaw and Shepard's in Lexis -- can be used to validate regulations just as they are used for statutes. See the section of this guide on Statutes: Validating Your Research for more information.

Additional Administrative Law Research Guides