United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seal of the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims

The United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims is the federal court that hears appeals from the Board of Veterans Appeals, an administrative board that itself hears appeals from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Decisions are appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The court's seven judges are appointed by the President to fifteen year terms.

The court hears no new testimony, conducts no trials, and considers no new evidence. Instead, it considers the BVA decision, the administrative record that was before the DVA, and briefs of the parties before it.

[edit] History

The United States Court of Veterans Appeals was created on November 18, 1988 by the Veterans' Judicial Review Act (Pub.L. 100-687, 102 Stat. 4105). The court's name was changed to United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims by the Veterans Programs Enhancement Act of 1998 (Pub.L. 105-368, 112 Stat. 3315).

[edit] Controversy

According to the Chief Judge, William Greene, the Court faces the challenge of a "greatly increased caseload." [1] This increasing caseload has been matched by an increasing number of decisions at the Court: Senator Akaka, who oversees the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs remarked in a November 7, 2007 hearing that "during Fiscal Year 2007, the court received 4,644 cases, and decided 4,877 cases. This is an all-time high for the court and I applaud its increased productivity." [2]

One Congressman has suggested that the appeals process for veterans is too protracted, with four levels of appeals (to the Board, to the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and to the U.S. Supreme Court), and the result may be a system of injustice: "The merry-go-round of the appeals process from the Regional Office to the Board of Veterans’ Appeals to the Court (the Court) and the usual merry-go-round of remands back and forth between the three has turned into almost a system of injustice for our veterans." [[3]]. An expert who testified before the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs stated that the Court is often in the position to remand appeals back to the VA system because it receives appeals from claimants whose claims had been "incorrectly accepted and prematurely denied . . . based on inadequate evidence" at the VA level. [[4]] More specifically, the VA work measurement system, driven by incentives to decide claims quickly, prevents VA adjudicators from being able to decide claims properly in the first instance. [[5]]