This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 9th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Careful listeners if this program are well aware of the degree to which federal agencies have their own courts or

rather court-like settings that function very differently from real courts.

But state administrative agencies have their own courts as well.

I spoke with Daniel Dew of the Pacific Legal Foundation about the impact of these executive

agency adjudications on Americans' rights.

Let's draw one big fat magic marker line between two things.

One is agencies that undertake adjudications and make determinations until very recently at the federal level could issue fines against people and the

Jarkasy decision changed that.

And on the other side of this fat magic marker line

is a real court where the rules of evidence are more stringent we have lots and

lots of precedent and attorneys arguing before a judge and employee of the judicial branch and making their cases in a I think

a more respectable format to be quite honestly it is a more of an adversarial proceeding.

So I did not have any

States have this too. States have administrative law judges who let's be clear are not real judges in the sense that we think

about judges. They're not employees of the judicial branch, they're

employees of the agency. The people arguing before these quote-unquote judges are also

employees of the agency and people or companies can find themselves in these rooms making

their case essentially to a fake court. So how do we get here? Yeah, that's an interesting

question. I think we got here by we keep stacking the deck against ordinary people. We think of it as not

reaching the level of a criminal case or even necessarily a civil case because these are just

...