A writ of mandate may be granted by a court as an order to an inferior tribunal, corporation, board or person, both public and private.
However, courts have generally inferred a prudential, but not jurisdictional, 60-day deadline, by analogy with the amount of time usually allowed for appeals.
[15] This is intended to give the party the opportunity to raise uncertainty in the law or facts and persuade the court to issue an alternative writ instead.
Writ petitions can also be filed with a superior court in order to compel an administrative agency or other entity, public or private, to perform a duty required by law.
[34] To avoid the obvious implication that nearly all California government agency decisions were now entirely immune from judicial review, the court held in 1939 that the writ of mandate could be used instead for that purpose.
[34] Regardless, the state legislature ratified and endorsed the new concept of administrative mandate in 1945 by enacting Code of Civil Procedure section 1094.5.
[34] Administrative mandate lies when the filing party wishes to appeal "any final administrative order or decision made as the result of a proceeding in which by law a hearing is required to be given, evidence is required to be taken, and discretion in the determination of facts is vested in the inferior tribunal".
[35] Proceedings subject to review by administrative mandate usually occur before state government agencies, such as the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, the State Hearings Division of the Department of Social Services and the various divisions of the Department of Industrial Relations.
Appellate review of the decisions of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board,[37] the Public Utilities Commission,[38] and the Workers Compensation Appeals Board of the Department of Industrial Relations[39] is available only by petition for writ of review (California's modern term for certiorari) to the relevant California Court of Appeal.