Writing for the majority in the 6-3 ruling in a pair of cases, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the Chevron framework has proved “unworkable” and allowed federal agencies to change course even without direction from Congress.
“Chevron was a judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties,” Roberts wrote.
He added the ruling would not call into question previous cases that relied on Chevron. But it will undoubtedly lead to a spate of new challenges of federal regulations.
The court’s three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented, with Kagan writing that the majority has turned itself into “the country’s administrative czar.”
In a lengthy dissent read from the bench, Kagan said the court discarded precedent, unwisely setting up the Supreme Court — and courts in general — as the final arbiter on regulatory matters in which they are not experts. Kagan said that power rightly belongs with federal agencies.
“In every sphere of current or future federal regulation, expect courts from now on to play a commanding role,” Kagan wrote in her opinion. “It is not a role Congress has given them. … It is a role this court has now claimed for itself, as well as other judges.”
Kagan went on to say the Friday ruling is likely to produce “large-scale disruption” since the previous decision had been relied upon heavily by the courts for decades.
The precedent, established in 1984, gave federal agencies flexibility to determine how to implement legislation passed by Congress. The 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 lower courts have relied on Chevron in tens of thousands of cases evaluating federal rules and orders, conservatives have balked at the legal precedent, and the approach has fallen out of favor in the last decade as the Supreme Court moved to the right. The high court’s conservative supermajority includes three justices nominated by President Donald Trump, whose administration put a premium on judges skeptical of federal government power and the so-called administrative state.
Supporters of Chevron, including environmental groups, labor and civil rights organizations and the Biden administration, told the court that Congress often writes broad statutes to give government experts the leeway to address emerging complex problems.
Sambhav Sankar, a vice president at Earthjustice, said in a statement the court’s decision “threatens the legitimacy of hundreds of regulations that keep us safe, protect our homes and environment, and create a level playing field for businesses to compete on.”
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 search of profits,” said Sankar, who was a law clerk to the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Opponents of Chevron, in contrast, say the framework unfairly tips the scales in litigation by requiring judges to systematically favor government regulators over those challenging burdensome regulations. Chevron has allowed federal agencies to flip-flop and impose different rules each time a new administration takes over, they said, leaving judges with little choice but to defer to the changing interpretations of agency officials.
“Today’s decision vindicates the rule of law,” Roman Martinez, an attorney for the plaintiffs in one of the cases decided Friday, said in a statement. “By ending Chevron deference, the court has taken a major step to shut down unlawful power grabs by federal agencies and to preserve the separation of powers.”
Allison Larsen, who teaches administrative law at William & Mary Law School, said the court’s decision to toss Chevron will lead to less predictability and a lack of uniformity as lower courts around the country assess agency decisions in different ways. That’s because judges, instead of agency experts, will now get to make scientific and technical judgments about how to interpret ambiguities in statutes, she said.
While the court could have limited Chevron’s reach, “six justices decided that wasn’t enough. That’s a bold move,” Larsen said.
The pair of cases before the court, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, were brought by Atlantic herring fishermen in 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 far broader implications for thousands of private companies and industries regulated by the government.
Both lawsuits were backed by conservative legal organizations — the 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.
