The U.S. Supreme Court overturned a 40-year-old precedent in striking down the so-called “Chevron” test, which instructed courts when they should defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of law in rulemaking. In its 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court discarded the analysis first adopted in its 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, holding that the test improperly elevated the executive branch’s legal interpretations over those of the judicial branch.
According to the Court’s majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, courts now must “exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the [administrative procedure act] requires.” In fact, Roberts continued, “courts need not and under the APA may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.”
The Court referred to Chevron as a departure from the U.S. Constitution and early U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as Marbury v. Madison, which envisioned that the courts, not the executive branch, would interpret laws. In contrast, Chevron required courts to defer to agency interpretations of the statutes that they administer if they were silent or ambiguous on a particular point. The Court also stated that the Chevron test defied the APA, in that it required judges to disregard their statutory duties.
The Court’s rejection of Chevron deference has left significant uncertainty about how courts are to weigh the competing arguments of federal agencies and plaintiffs challenging agency action in rulemaking litigation. However, the Court did explicitly state that all its decisions that previously relied on the Chevron test – including Chevron itself – remained valid and binding precedent.
In the cases at issue, fishing groups had challenged a 2018 National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) rule that required fishers to bear a portion of the cost of federal compliance monitors aboard their ships. The plaintiff fishing groups had unsuccessfully argued that the NMFS had relied on an overbroad interpretation of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisher Conservation Management Act and issued regulations that exceeded the agency’s authority. On appeal, both the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the dismissal of the cases before the lower federal district courts.
The cases are Loper Bright Enterprises et al. v. Gina Raimondo, Case Number 22-451, and Relentless Inc. et al. v. Department of Commerce et al., Case Number 22-1219, Supreme Court of the United States.
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