Office of Administrative Hearings

The Maryland Legislature created the independent Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH) in 1990 to provide the public with a corps of Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) to decide appeals of administrative agency decisions. The creation of OAH increased the fairness of administrative hearings by ensuring that the decision-maker presiding over an administrative hearing was not an employee of the same State agency that made the decision. Creating OAH also saved the State of Maryland the substantial cost of each State agency maintaining an administrative hearing unit.

OAH employs approximately fifty-five ALJs, each of whom was an experienced attorney prior to being appointed as an ALJ. ALJs preside over thousands of hearings a year and pride themselves on issuing decisions in each case within ninety days or less after the close of the record for the hearing.