Primary jurisdiction doctrine

Under the primary jurisdiction doctrine, “a court is ‘obliged to defer’ to an agency where the ‘issue brought before a court is in the process of litigation through procedures originating in the [agency].’”

“The question of whether an issue is within [an] agency’s primary jurisdiction is different from the question of whether the agency actually has exclusive statutory jurisdiction to resolve an issue.” Specifically, for an issue to fall within an agency’s primary jurisdiction, the agency need not possess definite authority to resolve it; rather, there need only be “sufficient statutory support for administrative authority. . . that the agency should at least be requested to. . . proceed[]” in the first instance. “[D]etermination of the agency’s primary jurisdiction involves a. . . pragmatic evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of allowing the agency to resolve an issue in the first instance.”