268
Opinion of the Court
Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission to exercise adjudicatory authority under the Act). Other split-function regimes involve only one agency, whose adjudicative and enforcement/litigation duties have been divided by Congress between two sub-"agencies," both of which are under the umbrella of the same overarching agency.
In this latter type of split-function regime, the only type that we address today, it is the overarching agency that is the "agency" for the purposes of Rule 15(a), since an order of the agency's designated adjudicator is in reality an order of the agency itself. That "agency" may then be free to designate its enforcer/litigator as its voice before the courts of appeals. To require the agency's adjudicator to appear before the courts of appeals makes little sense because that adjudicator has no more interest or stake in defending its orders in the courts of appeals than does a district court. It would also compel what we believe is a strange result—the substitution of an agency's adjudicator for its designated litigator once the case reaches the courts of appeals.
Although our interpretation of Rule 15(a), as the dissent points out, is not free from anomalies, neither is the dissent's interpretation. In particular, we take issue with the dissent's view that the overarching agency must have absolute veto power over the decisions of its adjudicator before the adjudicator is deemed to be "within" the agency and before the order of one can be considered the order of the other. Cf. 8 CFR § 3.1(h) (1996) (Attorney General may review and modify decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the Immigration and Naturalization Service's adjudicator). Other methods of agency oversight exist, and an agency's inability to employ the most compelling form of oversight does not mean it possesses no supervisory authority over its tribunal or that it is therefore somehow unfair to treat the adjudicator's order as the agency's. The Secretary of Labor's power under the LHWCA to appoint all five members of the Benefits Review Board, 33 U. S. C. § 921(b)(1), and
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