# Presumption of Regularity The judicial doctrine that **courts presume government officials have discharged their duties properly and in good faith**, absent clear evidence to the contrary. It is why a judge ordinarily accepts a Justice Department lawyer's representation about what a document says, why an agency's stated reason for a decision is normally taken at face value, and why the burden of showing bad faith falls on whoever alleges it. It is a presumption, not a rule — rebuttable by definition. But rebutting it is hard by design, and the height of that bar is the whole subject. ## What it actually does The doctrine is load-bearing in ways that are invisible until it fails: - **Agency action** is reviewed on the record the agency provides, and courts generally do not go behind that record to probe the decision-makers' actual motives. - **Prosecutorial decisions** — whom to charge, what to drop — receive substantial deference on the assumption they rest on evidence and law rather than on politics. - **Representations by government counsel** are credited without the corroboration a private litigant might be asked for. Remove the presumption and the machinery slows enormously: every filing invites discovery into motive, every assertion needs backup. ## Why it matters for the KB **1. It is the doctrine most exposed by an administration willing to spend it.** The presumption is not a reward for good behavior — it is an operating assumption courts make so that litigation is tractable. **That makes it a resource that can be drawn down.** Each instance in which government lawyers are found to have misrepresented the record makes the next judge marginally less willing to extend the assumption, and the cost is borne by every future administration, not the one that spent it. **2. Judges are visibly beginning to withhold it.** [[Emmet Sullivan]]'s conduct in the 2026 Epstein-records litigation is the clearest example — invoking the Ted Stevens prosecution, pressing DOJ lawyers on specific redactions rather than accepting their characterizations, and raising contempt. Stating that "the court has a right to know" is a judge announcing he no longer assumes he has been told the truth. See [[Emmet Sullivan - the public has a right to know what the hell is going on]]. **3. It cuts both ways, and the vault should record that.** The same presumption that protects a Justice Department acting in bad faith also protects career officials from having their motives litigated by every disappointed party. Erosion is not straightforwardly good. **What replaces a presumption of good faith is not scrutiny — it is unpredictability**, in which the deference a government litigant receives depends on which judge drew the case. **4. It is the quiet counterpart to the vault's enforcement-architecture finding.** [[Preclearance]] and the [[Bank Secrecy Act]] show that machinery matters more than rules. The presumption of regularity is machinery of a subtler kind: an unwritten default that makes the formal system workable, and that no one votes to repeal. ## See Also - [[Emmet Sullivan]] · [[Emmet Sullivan - the public has a right to know what the hell is going on]] - [[Department of Justice]] · [[Todd Blanche]] - [[Rule of Law]] · [[DC Circuit]] - [[Preclearance]] · [[Bank Secrecy Act]] — the machinery-over-rules pattern