The Supreme Court did not destroy the regulatory state. It stood up for due process.

In a series of rulings issued over the past week, the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has firmly defended the due process rights of Americans who come into conflict with the government.

Each of these rulings is significant in its own right. In two cases decided together last week, the Supreme Court overturned a decades-old precedent that required judges to defer to the presumed expertise of executive agencies. By striking down the so-called Chevron doctrine, the Court leveled the playing field for legal challenges to regulatory provisions.

In a separate case decided on Thursday SEC vs. JarkesyThe court said the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must handle civil fraud cases in federal district court rather than using its own internal administrative courts. The decision protects the right to a jury trial and will ensure that fewer Americans will have to navigate the costly, time-consuming administrative law system before their case can be heard in a real court.

Finally, the court ruled Monday that businesses can challenge federal regulations within six years of suffering harm at the hands of the administrative state. Previously, such challenges were limited to six years from the regulation itself’s approval — a finding that effectively eliminated any hope of due process for people harmed by the long-standing rule.

Taken together, the result of these four cases and three decisions is even greater than the sum of their parts. In identical 6–3 decisions, the Court’s conservative majority sent a clear message that federal judges should have the final say in cases involving the regulatory state—because that is the system our Constitution requires.

This is not an attempt to seize power by the federal judiciary — as some commentators have argued — but to restore judges to their proper role as checks on the powers of executive agencies.

“Most people understand that when it comes to criminal defendants, people deserve their day in court before a neutral arbitrator. It should also make sense that when the defendant is a family fishing business challenging the authority of an agency or a man accused of violating securities laws, they deserve those due process rights as well,” said Anastasia Boden, senior staff attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation. Reason after these rulings were announced.

Boden said the court’s decisions last week were “just an extension of due process rights for defendants to the giant administrative state. That’s something defenders of a fair and just society should celebrate — as they do in other contexts.”

Not everyone is celebrating, however. In a separate opinion to Monday’s Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve In ruling, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that “a tsunami of lawsuits against agencies that have resulted from the Court’s rulings in this case and (the case that overturned the ruling) Chevron doctrine) authorized, which has the potential to destroy the functioning of the Federal Government.”

While this may sound amazing to libertarians, unfortunately it is not entirely true. The promised tsunami of cases will only materialize if the federal government continues to crush the rights of Americans through the administrative state.

In other words, Jackson is saying that if the government violates due process often enough, it should be allowed to continue doing so, because it will simply be too difficult for the courts to fix the situation—that is, to ensure that justice is done for the victims of federal abuses. But if that’s true, then why have courts and the constitutional promises of due process?

The regulatory state will still exist. But now it will have to defend itself before real judges and juries, without expecting those judges and juries to simply acquiesce to the idea that regulators must know best.

To get a more rational view of what the Supreme Court is doing, you should read the majority opinion that overturned it. ChevronIn it, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the legal doctrine requiring judicial obedience to the regulatory state has created a “perpetual fog of uncertainty” about what the law actually says and that it has effectively allowed the administrative state to usurp the federal judiciary.

“Perhaps most fundamentally,” Roberts wrote, “Chevronthe presumption is incorrect because agencies have no special authority to resolve statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”

Due process matters, and judges are the arbiters of due process in our legal system. This should not be a controversial or radical perspective.

Trying to derive broad narratives from a series of Supreme Court rulings can be risky. Most cases are decided on narrow, legal grounds, not the sweeping statements that the political media tend to make them out to be.

But this seems to be the exception to the rule. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has spoken with a clear voice. In doing so, it has affirmed that individuals and businesses subject to federal regulation have the right to defend themselves without having to navigate a rigged quasi-judicial process within the executive branch.

In the future, this means that judges and courts will have fewer opportunities to dismiss cases and will instead have to consider the merits and constitutionality of challenged laws. This helps restore the balance of power, not break it.