Today, June 28, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) issued an opinion (link HERE) overruling Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce. Chevron deference call referred to the prior rule that courts should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of ambiguous statutes.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the opinion of the court, argued Chevron “defies the command of” the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs federal administrative agencies; saying that it “requires a court to ignore, not follow, ‘the reading the court would have reached had it exercised its independent judgment as required by the APA.” He added that Chevron deference “is misguided” because “agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”

In a dissenting opinion Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the ruling Friday was “yet another example of the Court’s resolve to roll back agency authority, despite congressional direction to the contrary.” She went on to opine that “Congress knows that it does not — in fact cannot — write perfectly complete regulatory statutes.” She also argued that Congress “knows that those statutes will inevitably contain ambiguities that some other actor will have to resolve, and gaps that some other actor will have to fill. And it would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a court.“

The Opinion notes that the court’s decision does not call into question prior cases that relied on Chevron, because they “are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology.”

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