Barr v. Nicholson
21 Vet. App. 303 (2007). Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, No. 04-0534, Chief Judge Greene. Precedential. Board decision vacated and remanded.
Read the abrogation section before citing this case. Part of Barr is no longer good law. The part most people cite it for is.
What survives, and it is the useful part
Once VA elects to provide a medical examination, the examination must be adequate. 21 Vet. App. at 311-12. That holding is intact and still carries weight: the Veterans Court relied on it eleven years later in Atencio v. O'Rourke, 30 Vet. App. 74, 88-89 (2018).
What "adequate" means comes from the cases Barr sits alongside — an examination is adequate where it is based on consideration of the veteran's prior medical history and examinations, and describes the disability in enough detail that the Board's evaluation will be "a fully informed one." Adequacy is a question of fact, reviewed for clear error. If you think an examination was inadequate, the exam problems page describes the practical side.
Barr also held that the presence of varicose veins is not a determination "medical in nature" — it is capable of lay observation. That matters beyond varicose veins: it is an example of the line between what a layperson can competently report and what requires a medical opinion. And the court held the Board committed prejudicial error in dismissing Mr. Barr's own statements as not competent, reminding the Board it "may not reject as not credible any uncorroborated statements merely because the contemporaneous medical evidence is silent as to complaints or treatment."
What was abrogated
Barr extended the continuity-of-symptomatology route in 38 C.F.R. §3.303(b) to varicose veins, a condition not named in the chronic-disease list at §3.309(a).
Six years later the Federal Circuit held that §3.303(b) reaches only the diseases actually listed in §3.309(a), and named Barr as one of the decisions it was overturning on that point. Walker v. Shinseki, 708 F.3d 1331, 1338 n.3 (Fed. Cir. 2013) — the Veterans Court "gave the benefit of §3.303(b) ... to a claim for varicose veins in Barr v. Nicholson, 21 Vet. App. 303 (2007), even though neither condition is named as a chronic disease in §3.309(a)" — and such decisions "are hereby abrogated."
So: cite Barr for exam adequacy and lay competence. Do not cite it for continuity of symptomatology on an unlisted condition. Confusing the two is a real and common error, and it is the kind that discredits everything else in the same brief.
Finding the opinion
The court's official PDF: Barr_04-0534.pdf. Published at 21 Vet. App. 303.
Educational summary. The decision addressed the facts and issues identified above; its outcome does not predict another claim. Check its precedential status and subsequent history before relying on it.
Reviewed October 6, 2026