The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned the Chevron decision, a fundamental constructing block of administrative law, shaking the facility and authority of all federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency.
The ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce represents the culmination of the Court's conservative revolution and joins recent landmark decisions resembling the repeal of abortion rights, the ban on affirmative motion, the expansion of gun rights, and more.
Although the 40-year-old Chevron precedent was largely unknown amongst non-lawyers until recently, its overturning by regulation can have profound consequences for the legal system and all the apparatus of presidency.
The basic idea of the Chevron Principle was that when there was ambiguity in a federal law, the agency charged by Congress with enforcing the law must be the primary to try and interpret the law. Courts would then defer to the agency's interpretation, provided that the agency's interpretation was reasonable. The intent and effect of the Chevron Principle was to treat agencies as what they’re: experts within the subject material assigned to them by Congress.
The EPA, for instance, has extensive environmental expertise. Under Chevron, it will subsequently have the courts' approval in interpreting environmental law. For this reason, Chevron would make lots of sense. The EPA already has the authority from Congress to enact environmental regulations, so it has been efficient for the EPA to bring even ambiguous laws into line with those rules.
Highly technical laws
The legal difficulty in Chevron from the start was that it made agencies, not courts, the first interpreters of the law. Courts generally don’t like to offer up their authority to interpret the law. Marbury v. Madison, the famous early Supreme Court decision that forms the premise of all modern judicial review, says that “it is the express business and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is.” Agencies are a part of the chief branch, not the judiciary.
So it has at all times been a bit of unusual for the Chevron Act to involve courts deferring to agencies' interpretations of the law quite than deciding cases themselves. But the trendy administrative state is complex. Applying vague congressional guidelines generally is a highly technical task, perhaps higher handled by subject material experts than judges. Viewed in that context, Chevron was one in every of the best acts of humility within the history of U.S. law.
In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the conservative majority has now officially torn down the veil of modesty and replaced it with direct oversight authority.
Roberts argued that the Administrative Procedure Act never expressly authorized, let alone directed, courts to defer to agencies' statutory interpretations. Chevron's formal legal logic was at all times based on the implicit conclusion that Congress intended that courts should obey agencies. Roberts' opinion asserted that this implicit conclusion “does not come anywhere close to reality.”
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, a former administrative law professor, reiterated the arguments for Chevron – arguments which were orthodox principles throughout her legal profession. The strongest argument is that Congress cannot possibly regulate complex regulatory issues by itself. It needs agencies and their expertise. Interpreting statutes and adopting regulations are central parts of the exercise of agencies' expertise. And she rightly added that overturning Chevron makes a mockery of stare decisis, the principle that precedent must be respected.
In practice, the conservative majority overturned the Chevron law because they distrust the authorities and need to offer the courts more power.
Turning point
This marks a turning point in the fundamental ideology of the contemporary conservative legal movement. The most significant mental leader of this movement was the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who was himself a professor of administrative law before becoming a judge. Scalia supported Chevron because he fundamentally believed in judicial restraint, and Chevron gave judges less power, no more.
It is notable, then, that the opinion was written by Roberts, the one conservative for whom judicial restraint stays an excellent. Roberts often prefers to water down old doctrines he doesn't like quite than reject them entirely. It's hard to flee the conclusion that Roberts believes that the agency's interpretation of ambiguous laws – unlike abortion or guns – will not be a problem that may bring public outrage.
Roberts might be right concerning the public, but environmentalists and other safety advocates now realize that even under a Democratic president, conservative courts will find it easier than ever to overturn agency actions they don't like.
Chevron was a doctrine established by Supreme Court justices 4 many years ago. It has now been overturned by the hands of very different justices. This is what a revolution looks like.
Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and professor of law at Harvard University. ©2024 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
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