Administrative law is self regulated. That means they do what pleases them. Most pilots who have been in the system fifty years have had bad encounters with administrative law. AOPA Legal Services has helped a great deal. The only limit to our liability, however, is how much money we put into training and airplanes and the paper that makes both real to them. The less of our personal ego we attribute to the paper, the greater our freedom. I'm not saying we don't have to do the paperwork; we really do. But is that what makes me a pilot? They have most of my paper now. They do not own my mind. I have trained hundreds of pilots. Any of them will fly with me.

Without getting into a thesis-length dissertation, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of how administrative law works, or for that matter how the legal system works, period, in this thread. It's impractical for me to try to synthesize 3 years of law school and 41 years of law practice into a few paragraphs. But let me just say that you won't find any case law which carries any weight about what a given law enforcement officer can or cannot do under hypothetical circumstances. Federal law varies considerably from state law, and state law from one state to another varies considerably as well. Administrative law is not a free-for-all, but it is different from case law and statutory law to the extent that it is less definitive--I would not call it self-regulating, however.

Your best avenue is to take your specific case, with its specific facts, to an experienced aviation and administrative law attorney, have him/her do the necessary research, and provide you with an opinion based on that research. Be prepared to pay for many hours of research, because there will be a lot of things to look at. Even then, you may not get what you want, because it simply may not exist.

Cary

And that's the discouraging part of it Cary. I believe what you say, I just don't like the idea that the burden of proof along with the costs associated with those many hours of research falls on the accused and violated. If there were recourse to file suit against those rare inspectors who we all agree exist then perhaps it might not seem like the deck is so unequally stacked. When I stand accused of an ordinary crime I go to court and plead my case before a jury of my peers. It's the criminal code in all it's forms that I either violated or didn't. The jury will decide my guilt or innocence based on this notion of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. When I stand before an administrative court I am dealing with the Code of Federal Regulations and their interpretation by an agency. Beyond a reasonable doubt has nothing to do with it. Or so I understand.

Mister701 wrote:And that's the discouraging part of it Cary. I believe what you say, I just don't like the idea that the burden of proof along with the costs associated with those many hours of research falls on the accused and violated. If there were recourse to file suit against those rare inspectors who we all agree exist then perhaps it might not seem like the deck is so unequally stacked. When I stand accused of an ordinary crime I go to court and plead my case before a jury of my peers. It's the criminal code in all it's forms that I either violated or didn't. The jury will decide my guilt or innocence based on this notion of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. When I stand before an administrative court I am dealing with the Code of Federal Regulations and their interpretation by an agency. Beyond a reasonable doubt has nothing to do with it. Or so I understand.

I have some bad news for you...even in criminal cases, you may not get to plead your case before a jury.

MTV

"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country." Or so we wrote to practice the keyboard on a Royal typewriter long ago. I believed it then, and I still do. There was a time after the Prophets when Israel demanded God give them a king like other nations. God said, through his prophet Samuel, "OK; but guess what?" Churchill said democracy, excepting all the other forms of government, is the worst. Such is life. He did a good job with it. I hope I have as well.