Supreme Court Rules Against Issue Exhaustion

     From the syllabus of the just announced Supreme Court opinion in Carr v. Saul:

Held: The Courts of Appeals erred in imposing an issue-exhaustion requirement on petitioners’ Appointments Clause claims. Pp. 4–12.

(a) Administrative review schemes commonly require parties to give the agency an opportunity to address an issue before seeking judicial review of that question. Such administrative issue-exhaustion requirements are typically creatures of statute or regulation. But where as here, no statute or regulation imposes an issue-exhaustion requirement, courts decide whether to require issue exhaustion based on “an analogy to the rule that appellate courts will not consider arguments not raised before trial courts.” Sims v. Apfel, 530 U. S. 103, 109. “[T]he desirability of a court imposing a requirement of issue exhaustion depends on the degree to which the analogy to normal adversarial litigation applies in a particular administrative proceeding.” Ibid. In Sims, which declined to apply an issue-exhaustion requirement to SSA Appeals Council proceedings, the Court explained that “the rationale for requiring issue exhaustion is at its greatest” when “the parties are expected to develop the issues in an adversarial administrative proceeding,” but is “much weaker” when “an administrative proceeding is not adversarial.” Id., at 110. Although Sims dealt with administrative review before the SSA Appeals Council, much of the opinion’s rationale applies equally to SSA ALJ proceedings. Pp. 4–8.

(b) Even assuming that ALJ proceedings are comparatively more adversarial than Appeals Council proceedings, the question remains whether the ALJ proceedings here were adversarial enough to support the “analogy to judicial proceedings” that undergirds judicially created issue-exhaustion requirements. Sims, 530 U. S., at 112 (plurality opinion). Pp. 8–12. 

(1) In the specific context of petitioners’ Appointments Clause challenges, two considerations tip the scales decidedly against imposing an issue-exhaustion requirement. First, agency adjudications are generally ill suited to address structural constitutional challenges,which usually fall outside the adjudicators’ areas of technical expertise. See, e.g., Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Bd., 561 U. S. 477, 491. Second, this Court has consistently recognized a futility exception to exhaustion requirements. See, e.g., Bethesda Hospital Assn. v. Bowen, 485 U. S. 399, 405–406. Both considerations apply fully here: Petitioners assert purely constitutional claims about which SSA ALJs have no special expertise and for which they can provide no relief. United States v. L. A. Tucker Truck Lines, Inc., 344 U. S. 33, distinguished. Pp. 9–11.

(2) The Commissioner’s contention that petitioners cannot obtain new hearings because they did not “timely challenge” their adjudicators’ appointments presumes what the Commissioner has failed to prove: that petitioners’ challenges are, in fact, untimely. The Commissioner’s reliance on Ryder v. United States, 515 U. S. 177, and Lucia, 585 U. S. ___, is misplaced, as neither decision had occasion to opine on what would constitute a “timely” objection in an administrative re-view scheme like the SSA’s. Pp. 11–12.