FAQs & Practical Guidance

Straight answers, no invented numbers

The questions people ask before filing are practical and almost never doctrinal. What does it cost. How long will it take. What are the chances. What if the agency approves the case a week after the complaint is filed. This section answers them directly, and where an honest answer is that the information does not exist, it says so rather than filling the space.

Start with the question asked most often. There is no published success rate for mandamus petitions. No court system reports outcomes by writ type in a form that supports a percentage, and any figure quoted without a source behind it was invented; what can be described honestly is which factors courts have said matter. The answerable questions have statutory answers. The civil filing fee is set by 28 U.S.C. § 1914, with the in forma pauperis route in 28 U.S.C. § 1915. The most dependable timing anchor in a district-court case is the 60-day response period of Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(a)(2). Fee recovery against the United States runs through the Equal Access to Justice Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2412(d), and a petitioner whose case becomes moot because the agency acted voluntarily may recover nothing, since Buckhannon Board & Care Home, Inc. v. West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, 532 U.S. 598 (2001), rejected the catalyst theory of prevailing-party status. Two further answers are worth stating plainly: filing changes nothing about the agency's other deadlines, and a second petition on the same facts is not barred by the first, though a court that denied one will want to know what has changed.

These answers assume the underlying claim already makes sense. Whether it does is a question for Foundations, and the standard an agency-delay complaint has to meet is in Agencies & Administrative Law or, for visa and USCIS cases, Immigration Delays. The full procedural sequence, from naming the respondent to responding to a motion to dismiss, is in The Practice Desk.