The third source of primary law is administrative law or agency law. Administrative agencies Administrative agencies are created by statute and charged with regulating an area of conduct. For example, the federal Food and Drug Administration regulates drug safety by requiring pharmaceutical companies to adhere to testing and reporting procedures. Agencies operate under the jurisdiction's administrative procedures law and the statute that created them (the "enabling law"). The most common form of administrative law encountered by law students and the public is formal rulemaking by agencies that produce regulations. The terms "rules" and "regulations" can be used interchangeably.
Federal agency regulations must be published in proposed form and again in final form. Regulations first appear in the Federal Register (FR), a daily publication that presents agency business in chronological order, showing what is done on a day-to-day basis. Once the regulations are published in final form, they are organized by agency and published in theCode of Federal Regulations (CFR). The CFR is essentially a subject arrangement of regulations and is organized into 50 titles, which are subdivided into parts, and further subdivided into sections. States have followed the federal example for organizing state agency regulations.
