In his majority ruling today for six justices in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Chief Justice Roberts rejects the so-called Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to an agency’s permissible interpretation of an ambiguous statute. The Court divided along ideological lines. In addition to joining the Chief’s opinion, Justice Thomas and Justice Gorsuch each wrote a concurring opinion. Justice Kagan wrote the dissent. (The Court decided Loper Bright and Relentless v. Secretary of Commerce in the same opinion. Justice Jackson recused from Loper Bright, so the margin was 6-2 in that case and 6-3 in Relentless.)
Here’s my quick effort to present and summarize the key parts of the Chief’s opinion:
1. The Administrative Procedures Act, enacted in 1946, codifies for agency cases the unremarkable yet elemental proposition reflected by judicial practice dating back to Marbury v Madison (1803): that courts decide legal questions by applying their own judgment. Section 706 specifies that courts, not agencies, will decide “all relevant questions of law” arising on review of agency action— even those involving ambiguous laws—and set aside any such action inconsistent with the law as they interpret it. And it prescribes no deferential standard for courts to employ in answering those legal questions. That omission is telling, because Section 706 does mandate that judicial review of agency policymaking and factfinding be deferential.
In deciding what a law means, courts may—as they have from the start—seek aid from the interpretations of those responsible for implementing particular statutes. Such interpretations constitute a body of experience and informed judgment to which courts and litigants may properly resort for guidance consistent with the APA. And interpretations issued contemporaneously with the statute at issue, and which have remained consistent over time, may be especially useful in determining the statute’s meaning.
When the best reading of a statute is that it delegates discretionary authority to an agency, the role of the reviewing court under the APA is, as always, to independently interpret the statute and effectuate the will of Congress subject to constitutional limits. The court fulfills that role by recognizing constitutional delegations, fixing the boundaries of the delegated authority, and ensuring the agency has engaged in reasoned decisionmaking within those boundaries.
2. The deference that Chevron requires of courts reviewing agency action cannot be squared with the APA. Neither Chevron nor any subsequent decision of this Court attempted to reconcile its framework with the APA.
3. The only question left is whether stare decisis, the doctrine governing judicial adherence to precedent, requires us to persist in the Chevron project. It does not. Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided. Experience has also shown that Chevron is unworkable. Our attempts to do so have only added to Chevron’s unworkability, transforming the original two-step into a dizzying breakdance. Four decades after its inception, Chevron has become an impediment, rather than an aid, to accomplishing the basic judicial task of “say[ing] what the law is.”
Rather than safeguarding reliance interests, Chevron affirmatively destroys them. Under Chevron, a statutory ambiguity, no matter why it is there, becomes a license authorizing an agency to change positions as much as it likes. Chevron accordingly has undermined the very “rule of law” values that stare decisis exists to secure.
4. We do not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful—including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself—are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology.