Annual Survey of Virginia Law: Administrative Procedure

Both the General Assembly and the Supreme Court of Virginia have been active recently in administrative law. For the past three years, a broadly-based movement for bureaucratic reform has influenced the legislative and executive branches of state government. The instrument for formal expression of this reform has been the Governor\u27s Regulatory Reform Advisory Board. In 1985, the General Assembly and the Governor responded obligingly to a second round of suggestions from the Board for amendment of the commonwealth\u27s general administrative process act. These legislative changes involved the definition of regulation, i.e., the output of a statutorily controlled administrative rulemaking process, and the consolidation of exemptions to and exclusions from the general procedural scheme. Returning to an issue of interpretation first addressed in 1982, the supreme court twice considered the time bars, concocted from statute and court rule, which limit judicial review of agency action