Supreme Court overturns Chevron precedent, limiting federal agencies’ power

In the 6-3 majority opinion in the two cases, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said Chevron’s structure proved “impractical” and allowed federal agencies to change course even without guidance from Congress.

“Chevron was a judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties,” Roberts wrote.

He added that the ruling would not undermine previous cases in which Chevron was based. But it will undoubtedly lead to a series of new challenges to federal regulations.

The court’s three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented, with Kagan writing that the majority had transformed into “the country’s administrative czar.”

In a lengthy dissenting opinion read by the justices, Kagan said the court had rejected precedent by unwisely creating the Supreme Court – and the courts generally — as the final arbiter on regulatory issues in which they are not experts. Kagan said that power rightly rests with federal agencies.

“In every area of ​​current or future federal regulation, we must expect the courts to play a dominant role from now on,” Kagan wrote in her opinion. “That is not the role that Congress assigned them. … It is the role that this court has now assigned to itself, as well as to other judges.”

Kagan continued speaking. this Friday the ruling is likely to cause “large-scale disruption” since the previous decision was courts have relied heavily on them for decades.

The precedent, set in 1984, gave federal agencies flexibility in determining how to implement legislation passed by Congress. This framework has been used extensively by the U.S. government to defend regulations designed to protect the environment, financial markets, consumers, and the workplace.

While the lower courts cited Chevron In tens of thousands of cases reviewing federal rules and regulations, conservatives have defied legal precedent, an approach that has fallen out of favor in the past decade as the Supreme Court has shifted to the right. The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority includes three justices nominated by President Donald Trump, whose administration has emphasized judges skeptical of the power of the federal government and the so-called administrative state.

Supporters Chevronincluding environmental, labor and civil rights groups, as well as the Biden administration, told the court that Congress often passes sweeping laws to give government experts latitude to address complex problems as they arise.

Sambhav Sankar, vice president of Earthjustice, said in a statement that the court’s decision “threatens the legality of hundreds of laws that keep us safe, protect our homes and the environment, and create a level playing field for businesses.”

The court’s conservative majority is “aggressively reshaping the foundations of our government so that the president and Congress have less power to protect the public and corporations have more power to challenge regulations in order to make profits,” said Sankar, who was a law clerk to the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Opponents ChevronBut the framework argues they unfairly tip the balance of litigation by requiring judges to systematically favor government regulators over those challenging burdensome regulations. Chevron allowed federal agencies to change the rules and impose different policies each time a new administration took over, they said, leaving judges with little choice but to defer to changing interpretations by agency officials.

“Today’s decision confirms the rule of law,” Roman Martinez, an attorney for the plaintiffs in one of the cases decided on Friday, said in a statement. “By ending its deference to Chevron, the court took an important step toward ending the illegal grab of power by federal agencies and preserving the separation of powers.”

Allison Larsen, who teaches administrative law at William & Mary Law School, said the court’s decision to throw out Chevron will lead to less predictability and a lack of uniformity as lower courts across the country evaluate agency decisions in different ways. That’s because judges, rather than agency experts, will now be able to make scientific and technical judgments about interpreting ambiguities in statutes, she added.

While the court could have limited Chevron’s reach, “the six justices found that wasn’t enough. It’s a bold move,” Larsen said.

A couple of cases pending before the court, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo AND Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, were brought in by Atlantic herring fishermen from New Jersey and Rhode Island who challenged federal rules initiated by the Trump administration requiring them to pay for at-sea monitors.

But the court’s decision has much broader implications for thousands of private companies and industries regulated by the government.

Both lawsuits were backed by conservative legal organizations — Cause of Action Institute and New Civil Liberties Alliance — that have received millions of dollars from the Koch network, founded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his late brother, David Koch.

This is a developing story. It will be updated.