146
Opinion of the Court
v. Salfi, 422 U. S. 749, 765 (1975) (exhaustion may allow agency "to compile a record which is adequate for judicial review").
B
Notwithstanding these substantial institutional interests, federal courts are vested with a "virtually unflagging obligation" to exercise the jurisdiction given them. Colorado River Water Conservation Dist. v. United States, 424 U. S. 800, 817-818 (1976). "We have no more right to decline the exercise of jurisdiction which is given, than to usurp that which is not given." Cohens v. Virginia, 6 Wheat. 264, 404 (1821). Accordingly, this Court has declined to require exhaustion in some circumstances even where administrative and judicial interests would counsel otherwise. In determining whether exhaustion is required, federal courts must balance the interest of the individual in retaining prompt access to a federal judicial forum against countervailing institutional interests favoring exhaustion. "[A]dministrative remedies need not be pursued if the litigant's interests in immediate judicial review outweigh the government's interests in the efficiency or administrative autonomy that the exhaustion doctrine is designed to further." West v. Bergland, 611 F. 2d 710, 715 (CA8 1979), cert. denied, 449 U. S. 821 (1980). Application of this balancing principle is "intensely practical," Bowen v. City of New York, 476 U. S., at 484, citing Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U. S. 319, 331, n. 11 (1976), because attention is directed to both the nature of the claim presented and the characteristics of the particular administrative procedure provided.
C
This Court's precedents have recognized at least three broad sets of circumstances in which the interests of the individual weigh heavily against requiring administrative exhaustion. First, requiring resort to the administrative remedy may occasion undue prejudice to subsequent assertion
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