Read the full Supreme Court Decision at CFACT.org
Chevron v. The Natural Resources Defense Council overturned. Bureaucratic overreach reined in!
Since the 1980s, regulatory agencies have relied upon the Chevron deference to resolve so-called “ambiguities” in law. In effect, bureaucrats have time and again relied on Chevron as justification for massive regulatory overreach, imposing far-reaching regulatory schemes that exceed the powers granted them by Congress.
In Loper Bright the Court decisively and explicitly overturned Chevron, substantially limiting the power of unelected bureaucrats to make policy decisions that the Constitution apportions to the legislature.
Loper Bright does not, however, provide relief from the many past rules promulgated under the Chevron doctrine. Loper Bright provides prospective relief from future bureaucratic overreach.
Read the full Supreme Court Decision at CFACT.org
Supreme Court Syllabus / Summary:
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Syllabus
LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES ET AL. v. RAIMONDO,
SECRETARY OF COMMERCE, ET AL.
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR
THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT
No. 22–451. Argued January 17, 2024—Decided June 28, 2024*
The Court granted certiorari in these cases limited to the question
whether Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council,
Inc., 467 U. S. 837, should be overruled or clarified. Under the Chev-
ron doctrine, courts have sometimes been required to defer to “permis-
sible” agency interpretations of the statutes those agencies adminis-
ter—even when a reviewing court reads the statute differently. Id., at
843. In each case below, the reviewing courts applied Chevron’s frame-
work to resolve in favor of the Government challenges by petitioners
to a rule promulgated by the National Marine Fisheries Service pur-
suant to the Magnuson-Stevens Act, 16 U. S. C. §1801 et seq., which
incorporates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U. S. C. §551
et seq.
Held: The Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their
independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within
its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency inter-
pretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous; Chevron is
overruled. Pp. 7–35.
(a) Article III of the Constitution assigns to the Federal Judiciary
the responsibility and power to adjudicate “Cases” and “Controver-
sies”—concrete disputes with consequences for the parties involved.
The Framers appreciated that the laws judges would necessarily apply
in resolving those disputes would not always be clear, but envisioned
that the final “interpretation of the laws” would be “the proper and
peculiar province of the courts.” The Federalist No. 78, p. 525 (A. Ham-
ilton). As Chief Justice Marshall declared in the foundational decision
of Marbury v. Madison, “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of
the judicial department to say what the law is.” 1 Cranch 137, 177. In
the decades following Marbury, when the meaning of a statute was at
issue, the judicial role was to “interpret the act of Congress, in order to
ascertain the rights of the parties.” Decatur v. Paulding, 14 Pet. 497,
515.
The Court recognized from the outset, though, that exercising inde-
pendent judgment often included according due respect to Executive
Branch interpretations of federal statutes. Such respect was thought
especially warranted when an Executive Branch interpretation was is-
sued roughly contemporaneously with enactment of the statute and
remained consistent over time. The Court also gave “the most respect-
ful consideration” to Executive Branch interpretations simply because
“[t]he officers concerned [were] usually able men, and masters of the
subject,” who may well have drafted the laws at issue. United States
v. Moore, 95 U. S. 760, 763. “Respect,” though, was just that. The
views of the Executive Branch could inform the judgment of the Judi-
ciary, but did not supersede it. “[I]n cases where [a court’s] own judg-
ment . . . differ[ed] from that of other high functionaries,” the court was
“not at liberty to surrender, or to waive it.” United States v. Dickson,
15 Pet. 141, 162.
During the “rapid expansion of the administrative process” that took
place during the New Deal era, United States v. Morton Salt Co., 338
U. S. 632, 644, the Court often treated agency determinations of fact
as binding on the courts, provided that there was “evidence to support
the findings,” St. Joseph Stock Yards Co. v. United States, 298 U. S.
38, 51. But the Court did not extend similar deference to agency reso-
lutions of questions of law. “The interpretation of the meaning of stat-
utes, as applied to justiciable controversies,” remained “exclusively a
judicial function.” United States v. American Trucking Assns., Inc.,
310 U. S. 534, 544. The Court also continued to note that the informed
judgment of the Executive Branch could be entitled to “great weight.”
Id., at 549. “The weight of such a judgment in a particular case,” the
Court observed, would “depend upon the thoroughness evident in its
consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier
and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give it power to
persuade, if lacking power to control.” Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323
U. S. 134, 140.
Occasionally during this period, the Court applied deferential re-
view after concluding that a particular statute empowered an agency
to decide how a broad statutory term applied to specific facts found by
the agency. See Gray v. Powell, 314 U. S. 402; NLRB v. Hearst Publi-
cations, Inc., 322 U. S. 111. But such deferential review, which the
Court was far from consistent in applying, was cabined to factbound
determinations. And the Court did not purport to refashion the
longstanding judicial approach to questions of law. It instead pro-
claimed that “[u]ndoubtedly questions of statutory interpretation . . .
are for the courts to resolve, giving appropriate weight to the judgment
of those whose special duty is to administer the questioned statute.”
Id., at 130–131. Nothing in the New Deal era or before it thus resem-
bled the deference rule the Court would begin applying decades later
to all varieties of agency interpretations of statutes under Chevron.
Pp. 7–13.
(b) Congress in 1946 enacted the APA “as a check upon administra-
tors whose zeal might otherwise have carried them to excesses not con-
templated in legislation creating their offices.” Morton Salt, 338 U. S.,
at 644. The APA prescribes procedures for agency action and deline-
ates the basic contours of judicial review of such action. And it codifies
for agency cases the unremarkable, yet elemental proposition reflected
by judicial practice dating back to Marbury: that courts decide legal
questions by applying their own judgment. As relevant here, the APA
specifies that courts, not agencies, will decide “all relevant questions
of law” arising on review of agency action, 5 U. S. C. §706 (emphasis
added)—even those involving ambiguous laws. It prescribes no defer-
ential standard for courts to employ in answering those legal ques-
tions, despite mandating deferential judicial review of agency policy-
making and factfinding. See §§706(2)(A), (E). And by directing courts
to “interpret constitutional and statutory provisions” without differen-
tiating between the two, §706, it makes clear that agency interpreta-
tions of statutes—like agency interpretations of the Constitution—are
not entitled to deference. The APA’s history and the contemporaneous
views of various respected commentators underscore the plain mean-
ing of its text.
Courts exercising independent judgment in determining the mean-
ing of statutory provisions, consistent with the APA, may—as they
have from the start—seek aid from the interpretations of those respon-
sible for implementing particular statutes. See Skidmore, 323 U. S.,
at 140. And 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.
Michigan v. EPA, 576 U. S. 743, 750 (quoting Allentown Mack Sales &
Service, Inc. v. NLRB, 522 U. S. 359, 374). By doing so, a court upholds
the traditional conception of the judicial function that the APA adopts.
Pp. 13–18.
(c) The deference that Chevron requires of courts reviewing agency
action cannot be squared with the APA. Pp. 18–29.
(1) Chevron, decided in 1984 by a bare quorum of six Justices, trig-
gered a marked departure from the traditional judicial approach of in-
dependently examining each statute to determine its meaning. The
question in the case was whether an Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) regulation was consistent with the term “stationary source” as
used in the Clean Air Act. 467 U. S., at 840. To answer that question,
the Court articulated and employed a now familiar two-step approach
broadly applicable to review of agency action. The first step was to
discern “whether Congress ha[d] directly spoken to the precise ques-
tion at issue.” Id., at 842. The Court explained that “[i]f the intent of
Congress is clear, that is the end of the matter,” ibid., and courts were
therefore to “reject administrative constructions which are contrary to
clear congressional intent,” id., at 843, n. 9. But in a case in which “the
statute [was] silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue” at
hand, a reviewing court could not “simply impose its own construction
on the statute, as would be necessary in the absence of an administra-
tive interpretation.” Id., at 843 (footnote omitted). Instead, at Chev-
ron’s second step, a court had to defer to the agency if it had offered “a
permissible construction of the statute,” ibid., even if not “the reading
the court would have reached if the question initially had arisen in a
judicial proceeding,” ibid., n. 11. Employing this new test, the Court
concluded that Congress had not addressed the question at issue with
the necessary “level of specificity” and that EPA’s interpretation was
“entitled to deference.” Id., at 865.
Although the Court did not at first treat Chevron as the watershed
decision it was fated to become, the Court and the courts of appeals
were soon routinely invoking its framework as the governing standard
in cases involving statutory questions of agency authority. The Court
eventually decided that Chevron rested on “a presumption that Con-
gress, when it left ambiguity in a statute meant for implementation by
an agency, understood that the ambiguity would be resolved, first and
foremost, by the agency, and desired the agency (rather than the
courts) to possess whatever degree of discretion the ambiguity allows.”
Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N. A., 517 U. S. 735, 740–741. Pp.
18–20.
(2) Neither Chevron nor any subsequent decision of the Court at-
tempted to reconcile its framework with the APA. Chevron defies the
command of the APA that “the reviewing court”—not the agency whose
action it reviews—is to “decide all relevant questions of law” and “in-
terpret . . . statutory provisions.” §706 (emphasis added). 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. Chevron, 467 U. S., at 843, n. 11. Chevron insists on more than
the “respect” historically given to Executive Branch interpretations; it
demands that courts mechanically afford binding deference to agency
interpretations, including those that have been inconsistent over time,
see id., at 863, and even when a pre-existing judicial precedent holds
that an ambiguous statute means something else, National Cable &
Telecommunications Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services, 545 U. S. 967,
982. That regime is the antithesis of the time honored approach the
APA prescribes.
Chevron cannot be reconciled with the APA by presuming that stat-
utory ambiguities are implicit delegations to agencies. That presump-
tion does not approximate reality. A statutory ambiguity does not nec-
essarily reflect a congressional intent that an agency, as opposed to a
court, resolve the resulting interpretive question. Many or perhaps
most statutory ambiguities may be unintentional. And when courts
confront statutory ambiguities in cases that do not involve agency in-
terpretations or delegations of authority, they are not somehow re-
lieved of their obligation to independently interpret the statutes. In-
stead of declaring a particular party’s reading “permissible” in such a
case, courts use every tool at their disposal to determine the best read-
ing of the statute and resolve the ambiguity. But in an agency case as
in any other, there is a best reading all the same—“the reading the
court would have reached” if no agency were involved. Chevron, 467
U. S., at 843, n. 11. It therefore makes no sense to speak of a “permis-
sible” interpretation that is not the one the court, after applying all
relevant interpretive tools, concludes is best.
Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided
because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory
ambiguities. Courts do. The Framers anticipated that courts would
often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would
resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment. Chevron
gravely erred in concluding that the inquiry is fundamentally different
just because an administrative interpretation is in play. The very
point of the traditional tools of statutory construction is to resolve stat-
utory ambiguities. That is no less true when the ambiguity is about
the scope of an agency’s own power—perhaps the occasion on which
abdication in favor of the agency is least appropriate. Pp. 21–23.
(3) The Government responds that Congress must generally in-
tend for agencies to resolve statutory ambiguities because agencies
have subject matter expertise regarding the statutes they administer;
because deferring to agencies purportedly promotes the uniform con-
struction of federal law; and because resolving statutory ambiguities
can involve policymaking best left to political actors, rather than
courts. See Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219, pp. 16–19. But none
of these considerations justifies Chevron’s sweeping presumption of
congressional intent.
As the Court recently noted, interpretive issues arising in connec-
tion with a regulatory scheme “may fall more naturally into a judge’s
bailiwick” than an agency’s. Kisor v. Wilkie, 588 U. S. 558, 578. Under
Chevron’s broad rule of deference, though, ambiguities of all stripes
trigger deference, even in cases having little to do with an agency’s
technical subject matter expertise. And even when an ambiguity hap-
pens to implicate a technical matter, it does not follow that Congress
has taken the power to authoritatively interpret the statute from the
courts and given it to the agency. Congress expects courts to handle
technical statutory questions, and courts did so without issue in
agency cases before Chevron. After all, in an agency case in particular,
the reviewing court will go about its task with the agency’s “body of
experience and informed judgment,” among other information, at its
disposal. Skidmore, 323 U. S., at 140. An agency’s interpretation of a
statute “cannot bind a court,” but may be especially informative “to the
extent it rests on factual premises within [the agency’s] expertise.” Bu-
reau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms v. FLRA, 464 U. S. 89, 98, n. 8.
Delegating ultimate interpretive authority to agencies is simply not
necessary to ensure that the resolution of statutory ambiguities is well
informed by subject matter expertise.
Nor does a desire for the uniform construction of federal law justify
Chevron. It is unclear how much the Chevron doctrine as a whole ac-
tually promotes such uniformity, and in any event, we see no reason to
presume that Congress prefers uniformity for uniformity’s sake over
the correct interpretation of the laws it enacts.
Finally, the view that interpretation of ambiguous statutory provi-
sions amounts to policymaking suited for political actors rather than
courts is especially mistaken because it rests on a profound misconcep-
tion of the judicial role. Resolution of statutory ambiguities involves
legal interpretation, and that task does not suddenly become policy-
making just because a court has an “agency to fall back on.” Kisor, 588
U. S., at 575. Courts interpret statutes, no matter the context, based
on the traditional tools of statutory construction, not individual policy
preferences. To stay out of discretionary policymaking left to the po-
litical branches, judges need only fulfill their obligations under the
APA to independently identify and respect such delegations of author-
ity, police the outer statutory boundaries of those delegations, and en-
sure that agencies exercise their discretion consistent with the APA.
By forcing courts to instead pretend that ambiguities are necessarily
delegations, Chevron prevents judges from judging. Pp. 23–26.
(4) Because Chevron’s justifying presumption is, as Members of
the Court have often recognized, a fiction, the Court has spent the bet-
ter part of four decades imposing one limitation on Chevron after an-
other. Confronted with the byzantine set of preconditions and excep-
tions that has resulted, some courts have simply bypassed Chevron or
failed to heed its various steps and nuances. The Court, for its part,
has not deferred to an agency interpretation under Chevron since
2016. But because Chevron remains on the books, litigants must con-
tinue to wrestle with it, and lower courts—bound by even the Court’s
crumbling precedents—understandably continue to apply it. At best,
Chevron has been a distraction from the question that matters: Does
the statute authorize the challenged agency action? And at worst, it
has required courts to violate the APA by yielding to an agency the
express responsibility, vested in “the reviewing court,” to “decide all
relevant questions of law” and “interpret . . . statutory provisions.”
§706 (emphasis added). Pp. 26–29.
(d) Stare decisis, the doctrine governing judicial adherence to prece-
dent, does not require the Court to persist in the Chevron project. The
stare decisis considerations most relevant here—“the quality of [the
precedent’s] reasoning, the workability of the rule it established, . . .
and reliance on the decision,” Knick v. Township of Scott, 588 U. S.
180, 203 (quoting Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees,
585 U. S. 878, 917)—all weigh in favor of letting Chevron go.
Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided. It reshaped ju-
dicial review of agency action without grappling with the APA, the
statute that lays out how such review works. And its flaws were ap-
parent from the start, prompting the Court to revise its foundations
and continually limit its application.
Experience has also shown that Chevron is unworkable. The defin-
ing feature of its framework is the identification of statutory ambigu-
ity, but the concept of ambiguity has always evaded meaningful defi-
nition. Such an impressionistic and malleable concept “cannot stand
as an every-day test for allocating” interpretive authority between
courts and agencies. Swift & Co. v. Wickham, 382 U. S. 111, 125. The
Court has also been forced to clarify the doctrine again and again, only
adding to Chevron’s unworkability, and the doctrine continues to
spawn difficult threshold questions that promise to further complicate
the inquiry should Chevron be retained. And its continuing import is
far from clear, as courts have often declined to engage with the doc-
trine, saying it makes no difference.
Nor has Chevron fostered meaningful reliance. Given the Court’s
constant tinkering with and eventual turn away from Chevron, it is
hard to see how anyone could reasonably expect a court to rely on Chev-
ron in any particular case or expect it to produce readily foreseeable
outcomes. And rather than safeguarding reliance interests, Chevron
affirmatively destroys them by allowing agencies to change course
even when Congress has given them no power to do so.
The only way to “ensure that the law will not merely change errati-
cally, but will develop in a principled and intelligible fashion,” Vasquez
v. Hillery, 474 U. S. 254, 265, is for the Court to leave Chevron behind.
By overruling Chevron, though, the Court does 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 the Court’s change in interpretive methodology.
See CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries, 553 U. S. 442, 457. Mere reliance
on Chevron cannot constitute a “ ‘special justification’ ” for overruling
such a holding. Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., 573 U. S.
258, 266 (quoting Dickerson v. United States, 530 U. S. 428, 443). Pp.
29–35.
No. 22–451, 45 F. 4th 359 & No. 22–1219, 62 F. 4th 621, vacated and
remanded.
ROBERTS , C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which THOMAS ,
ALITO , GORSUCH, K AVANAUGH , and BARRETT , JJ., joined. THOMAS , J., and
G ORSUCH, J., filed concurring opinions. KAGAN, J., filed a dissenting
opinion, in which SOTOMAYOR, J., joined, and in which J ACKSON, J., joined
as it applies to No. 22–1219. JACKSON, J., took no part in the considera-
tion or decision of the case in No. 22–451.