Supreme Court Overrules Chevron Doctrine

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday overturned the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine, holding that from here on out, federal judges should not defer to agency interpretations of unclear regulations.

The 6-3 ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, is a huge victory for the business community, which has argued for decades that the doctrine gave an unfair advantage to federal agencies in disputes over regulatory decisions.

At the same time, Friday’s ruling is sure to be seen as a historic curtailing of the federal government’s power to enact blanket policies in a wide range of areas, expecting bureaucrats to ultimately decide how they will be implemented.

The doctrine was established by the high courts’ landmark 1984 ruling in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., which for the first time established a legal test for when federal courts must defer to a government agency’s interpretation of a law or statute.

The so-called Chevron deference consisted of a two-part test that was deferential to government agencies.

First, whether Congress has spoken directly to the precise issue at question, and second, “whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.”

Reading from the bench on Friday morning, Roberts called Chevron a “fundamentally misguided decision.”

He went on to explain that in the majority’s view, the long-standing deference clearly violates the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires courts to exercise their independent judgment. 

Roberts added that the deference is also at odds with the constitutional role of courts in interpreting statutory ambiguity.

“Chevron does not prevent judges from making policy, it prevents them from judging,” the chief justice said.

Roberts said while the court itself has not applied the doctrine in almost a decade, the 1984 ruling placed too much power in the hands of agencies that “have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities.”

The chief justice also stated that the court itself has not applied the doctrine since 2016.

“In short, Chevron is both wrong and legally irrelevant,” he said. “The time has come to leave it behind.” 

With a flourish, Roberts added, “Chevron is overruled.”

Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas wrote concurring opinions.

For his part, Gorsuch said the majority had no choice but to strike down the Chevron doctrine, calling it a “grave anomaly” when seen in the context of “historic judicial practice.”

To Thomas, Chevron smacked of an almost brazen violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers, diminishing the “judicial power afforded to courts” while “simultaneously expanding agencies’ executive power beyond constitutional limits.”

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan accused the court’s conservative majority of exercising a “bald assertion of judicial power.”

“[This ruling] puts courts at the apex of administrative process as to every conceivable subject,” she said.

She went on to dismiss Friday’s decision, along with Thursday’s ruling in SEC v. Jarkesy, in which the majority limited the Securities and Exchange Commission’s use of in-house tribunals, as “yet another example of the court’s resolve to roll back agency authority.”

Kagan was joined in her dissent by the court’s other two liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In the underlying lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court’s ruling, a group of commercial fishermen argued that a new agency regulation requiring them to pay for outside observers violates federal law.

However, before it reached the Supreme Court, both the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the agency, finding that the requirement was based on a reasonable reading of the statute.

The consolidated cases leading to Friday’s ruling were Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, No. 22-451, and Relentless v. Department of Commerce, No. 22-1219.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue