In a move that will surely leave federal agencies rummaging through their filing cabinets in existential dread, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday officially jettisoned what’s known as the Chevron doctrine, a 40-year-old legal precedent that allowed executive branch agencies the benefit of the doubt when interpreting ambiguously worded laws. The ruling, as delivered in a 6–3 decision in the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, politely told the administrative state, in effect, to kindly stop filling in the blanks as it sees fit.
“Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, holding the pen with an air of judicial finality. Translation: judges, not bureaucrats with acronym-laden job titles, will now play the lead role in interpreting Congress’s occasionally cryptic legislative poetry.
The decision overturns a 1984 precedent from Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, under which courts deferred to agencies when a statute was silent or unclear, as long as the agency’s interpretation was deemed reasonable. What this essentially meant was that the Environmental Protection Agency and its many regulatory cousins could look at Congress’s ambiguities and see a green light where others might only see a yellow caution sign or even a STOP written in invisible ink.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing in dissent for the high court’s liberal trio, described the ruling as both “a judicial power grab” and “a massive shock to the legal system,” suggesting the Court had not so much trimmed the bureaucratic hedges as clear-cut the administrative forest. She noted that tossing Chevron to the curb would bring a tidal wave of litigation and argued that the Court was replacing expert agency judgment with “judicial guesswork,” which, while bold, is rarely the stuff of operational policy manuals.
The decision is the culmination of years of conservative legal efforts to hobble what critics call the “administrative state,” which to some means unelected officials doing far too much interpreting and not nearly enough pencil pushing. It also marks a significant philosophical shift, giving courts rather than agencies the final word on statutory interpretation. Which is great news for judges and law clerks who now won’t need to pretend they don’t enjoy parsing vague congressional phrasing in magisterial solitude.
For now, agencies will likely need to polish up their statutory citations and take a long, hard look in the regulatory mirror. Congress, meanwhile, might be advised to stop writing laws that read like fortune cookies and start including a few more footnotes. After decades of watching courts nod approvingly at federal interpretations, the new message from the bench seems to be: we’ll take it from here.
Apparently, when it comes to vague legislation, even the Supreme Court has had enough of “just trust us.”