219 Opinion of the Court. (3) While we think that the Board properly construed the scope of the remand not to require a retrial of issues canvassed at the first hearing, time does not stop still even for the administrative process. Change in circumstances may make relevant at the second hearing what was <irrelevant at the first hearing. The Circuit Court of Appeals found such a change in circumstances in a decision. of this Court rendered after the first review below. In its decision of November 6, 1941, the Circuit Court of Appeals sustained the exclusion by the Board of testimony to prove misdeeds by International. The tenor of its reasoning was that an inquiry into charges of unfair labor practices by the Company did not make relevant charges of misconduct against International, the complainant. The Board issued the order now challenged on June 9, 1943. In the meantime, on January 18, 1943, this Court decided National Labor Relations Board v. Indiana & Michigan Electric Co., 318 U. S. 9. That case, so the court below thought, required the admission at the second hearing of the offer of proof regarding International's acts of violence. We regard this as a misapplication of the Indiana & Michigan case. This case is not that case. They have in common an accusation of grave misconduct against a complainant before the Board. Otherwise, the circumstances of the two cases, and the legal issues they raise, are very different. The Indiana & Michigan case involved a proceeding under § 10 (e) of the National Labor Relations Act authorizing the Circuit Court of Appeals to order additional evidence to be taken before the Board when it is shown "to the satisfaction of the court that such additional evidence is material and that there were reasonable grounds for the failure to adduce such evidence" at the hearing. We had previously held that such an application "was addressed to the sound judicial dis Opinion of the Court. 330 U.S. cretion of the court." Southport Petroleum Co. v. Labor Board, 315 U. S. 100, 104. Section 10 (e) in effect formulates a familiar principle regarding newly discovered evidence. Even without such explicitness this Court has, on occasion, not allowed administrative orders to stand where there has been a drastic change in circumstances. In Indiana & Michigan the offer of proof related to events subsequent to the Board's hearing, tending to show acts of serious violence on behalf of a complaining union. The Board had refused to reopen the case and the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granted the application under § 10 (e). We held that, in the light of the circumstances before it, the Circuit Court of Appeals did not abuse its discretion in ordering additional evidence to be taken before the Board. The proffered testimony was held relevant on three grounds: (1) Inasmuch as the Board, by the very nature of its case load, must exercise discretion in entertaining complaints, the newly revealed misconduct on the part of the complainant might affect, not the jurisdiction of the Board, but the exercise of its power to entertain a charge; (2) the new evidence bore materially upon the credibility of some important witnesses before the Board; (3) the Board had attributed to the Company responsibility for the conduct of some of its supervisory employees, and the new evidence might lead the Board to conclude that their conduct was to be attributed to self-interest and not charged against the employer. Here we have a totally different situation. We are not reviewing an allowable exercise of judicial discretion by the Circuit Court of Appeals in ordering the Board to hear newly discovered evidence. On review of its order, the Board cannot be compelled to admit evidence which it excluded unless such exclusion was clearly insupportable. The power to adduce additional evidence granted 219 Opinion of the Court. to the Circuit Court of Appeals by § 10 (e) cannot be employed to enlarge the statutory scope of judicial review. The short of the matter is that the Court deemed it reversible error on the part of the Board not to entertain testimony on a matter which the court deemed irrelevant to the issues at the first hearing. It did so because it interpreted the Indiana & Michigan case to hold that failure by the Board to allow a full-dress inquiry into the misconduct of a complainant, particularly if very serious, renders the proceedings unfair as a matter of law. We were not dealing with such an abstraction in the Indiana & Michigan case. Nothing short of such an abstraction will justify invalidation of the order in this case because the Board did not deal with the charges against International as a separate issue, or as though the International had been on trial. The only consideration affecting the behavior of a complainant that played a part in the decision in Indiana & Michigan and which may here be invoked, is the suggestion that the character of a complainant may rightfully influence the Board in entertaining a complaint. But the charges against International had in fact been brought to the attention of the Board even though not in the way in which International would have been tried had it been formally charged with crime. It would be unreal to deny that there was plenty of evidence in the record to apprise the Board of alleged misconduct by International if on that score it chose not to entertain charges of unfair labor practices against the company. In the light of the Board's opinion, it would be doctrinaire to assume that it would have reached any other result if evidence of International's misconduct had been more voluminous. Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. v. National Labor Relations Board, supra. The two other respects in which newly discovered evidence as to violence was ordered to be heard in the Indiana & Michigan case are 330 U.S. Opinion of the Court. completely lacking here. Here we have not new evidence material to the credibility of important witnesses or relevant in assessing the responsibility by an employer for conduct of supervisory employees. The refusal of the Board in effect to try International did not impair the validity of the Board's order. Even in judicial trials, the whole tendency is to leave rulings as to the illuminating relevance of testimony largely to the discretion of the trial court that hears the evidence. See, e. g., Morgan, Foreword, American Law Institute Code of Evidence, p. 15. Courts of appeal are less and less inclined to base error on such rulings. Administrative tribunals are given even freer scope in the application of the conventional rules of evidence. See Tagg Bros. v. United States, 280 U. S. 420, 442. It is significant that the Wagner Act specifically provided that "the rules of evidence prevailing in courts of law or equity shall not be controlling." § 10 (b). Third. This brings us to the only other objection to a ruling of the Board made after the first hearing. On the first review, the court below rejected the Company's contention that the Examiner was biased. 123 F. 2d at 219. On the second review, the Court was of opinion that the Board improperly denied the Company's application for a new Examiner. It did so, apparently, not because it found actual bias on the part of the Examiner demonstrated at either hearing. The Court seemed to be moved by the generous feeling that a party ought not to be put to trial before an examiner who, by reason of his prior rulings and findings, may not be capable of exercising impartiality. Certainly it is not the rule of judicial administration that, statutory requirements apart, see Judicial Code § 21, 28 U. S. C. § 25, a judge is disqualified from sitting in a retrial because he was reversed on earlier rulings. We find no warrant for impos 219 Opinion of the Court. ing upon administrative agencies a stiffer rule, whereby examiners would be disentitled to sit because they ruled strongly against a party in the first hearing. The Board might have gone beyond the legal compulsions and ordered the new evidence to be heard before a new Examiner who could report with a mind wholly free from prior litigious embroilments. The Board might have been well advised also to allow greater leeway in admitting evidence not strictly relevant. It takes time to avoid even the appearance of grievances. But it is time well spent, even though it is not easy to satisfy interested parties, and defeated litigants, no matter how fairly treated, do not always have the feeling that they have received justice. In any event, we are not the advisers of these agencies. And we have no right to upset their orders unless they fall afoul of legal requirements. Cf. Inland Empire Council v. Millis, 325 U. S. 697. We do not find that the Board's order offends them. Fourth. We have examined all the issues pressed here but we need not enlarge upon our conclusion that they are without merit. There remains the proper disposition of the case. Having found infirmities in the proceedings which led to the order, the Court below did not consider the sufficiency of the evidence to sustain the findings on which the order was based. This controversy has been so long in litigation that, other things being equal, it would be highly desirable finally to dispose of the whole case here. But other things are not equal. It is not the function of this Court to review in the first instance the sufficiency of evidence on which the Board's order is based. Congress placed that function in the Circuit Court of Appeals. And this case is peculiarly not one in which we should do the unusual thing and pass on evidence without its prior consideration by the lower court. It is not for us to make an independent examination of this entire record. The de |