Buchanan v. Nicholson

451 F.3d 1331 (Fed. Cir. 2006), decided June 14, 2006. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, No. 05-7174, Circuit Judge Prost. Precedential. Veterans Court vacated and remanded.

If one case on this list is worth knowing by heart, it is probably this one, because the thing it forbids is the thing that happens most often.

What it holds

The Board cannot decide that your story is not believable merely because no medical record from the time says the same thing.

The court put it as plainly as that: "the Board cannot determine that lay evidence lacks credibility merely because it is unaccompanied by contemporaneous medical evidence." And: "If the Board concludes that the lay evidence presented by a veteran is credible and ultimately competent, the lack of contemporaneous medical evidence should not be an absolute bar to the veteran's ability to prove his claim."

The reasoning is statutory. 38 U.S.C. §1154(a) requires "due consideration" of all pertinent medical and lay evidence. 38 U.S.C. §5107(b) requires VA to consider all lay and medical evidence of record. And 38 C.F.R. §3.307(b) says in so many words that the factual basis "may be established by medical evidence, competent lay evidence or both." Read as the Board had read it, the court said, the rule "would render portions of the statutes and regulations meaningless as it would read out the option of establishing service connection based on competent lay evidence."

What happened in the record

Mr. Buchanan was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. He submitted affidavits from relatives, acquaintances, and the sergeant who led his unit, all describing the onset of his symptoms during service, plus a private medical opinion that the symptoms first appeared in service.

The Board wrote: "Recollections of medical problems some 20 years after the veteran's separation from service have slight probative value and lack credibility absent confirmatory clinical records to substantiate such recollections."

The Federal Circuit split that sentence in half. Discounting the statements for the twenty-year delay was within the Board's discretion to weigh evidence, and not challenged. The second half — lacking credibility absent confirmatory records — was legal error.

The court also noticed something about the examiner the Board had found most persuasive. The Board credited that opinion for relying "on the objective medical documents in the record." But the examiner "ultimately relies not on the objective medical evidence, but rather the absence of such," reasoning from the lack of in-service documentation to the conclusion that the symptoms had not begun in service.

What it does not hold

It does not make lay statements binding, and the opinion is careful about this. The Board remains "obligated to, and fully justified in, determining whether lay evidence is credible in and of itself, i.e., because of possible bias, conflicting statements, etc." It may also weigh the absence of contemporaneous records against the lay evidence. What it may not do is treat that absence as settling the question by itself.

In practice the difference shows up in how a denial is written. A Board decision that says your statements conflict with what you told your doctor in 2008 is doing something Buchanan allows. One that says there is nothing in your service treatment records and stops there is not.

Why this matters more than it looks

Service treatment records are frequently thin, and sometimes they do not exist — a great many burned in the 1973 National Personnel Records Center fire, which is the backdrop to Jandreau, decided a year later. The court in Jandreau made the connection explicit: the rule in Buchanan "is particularly important when veterans' service medical records have been destroyed. Unless lay evidence were allowed, it would be virtually impossible for a veteran to establish his claim."

How to write a statement that can actually be weighed is on the lay statements page.

Finding the opinion

The Federal Circuit's official PDF: 05-7174.pdf. Published at 451 F.3d 1331.

Reviewed October 6, 2026