Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 2024

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo

603 U.S. 369

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Takeaway

In short, Loper Bright overruled Chevron: federal courts must independently determine the best reading of statutes governing agency action, while giving agency views only the persuasive weight they earn and respecting actual congressional delegations of discretion.

Background

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act authorizes the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to administer federal fishery-management plans. A 2020 NMFS rule required certain Atlantic herring vessels to carry at-sea observers. If NMFS did not provide a federally funded observer, the vessel owner had to hire and pay a certified third-party observer. NMFS estimated that the program could cost as much as $710 per day and reduce some vessels’ annual returns by up to 20 percent.

Family-owned fishing businesses challenged the rule, arguing that the Magnuson-Stevens Act authorized observers but did not authorize NMFS to force Atlantic herring fishermen to pay their costs. The Act expressly authorizes industry-funded observers in several other contexts—foreign vessels, certain quota programs, and North Pacific fisheries—but contains no comparable provision for Atlantic herring vessels.

The District Court and the D.C. Circuit rejected Loper Bright’s challenge. The D.C. Circuit found uncertainty about whether the Act authorized the payment requirement and, under Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, deferred to NMFS’s reasonable interpretation. In the companion case, the District Court and First Circuit likewise upheld the rule under Chevron. The Supreme Court granted review only on whether Chevron should be overruled or clarified, vacated both judgments, and remanded.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the Administrative Procedure Act permits courts to defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute merely because the agency administers that statute.

Holding

No. The APA requires reviewing courts to exercise independent judgment on questions of law; courts may not defer to an agency’s legal interpretation solely because a statute is ambiguous.

Reasoning

Article III assigns federal courts the duty to decide cases and controversies, and resolving legal disputes requires courts to determine what the law means. From Marbury onward, the Court explained, statutory interpretation has been a central judicial function. Executive interpretations could receive respect and may assist a court, but they did not displace the court’s independent judgment.

The historical practice before Chevron distinguished between persuasive respect for agency views and binding deference. Courts could give substantial weight to a contemporaneous, consistent executive interpretation or to an agency’s specialized experience. But they remained responsible for deciding the statute’s meaning, and they could not surrender their own judgment simply because an agency took a different view.

The APA codified that traditional allocation of responsibility. Section 706 directs that a reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law and interpret constitutional and statutory provisions. The statute provides deferential standards for agency factfinding and discretionary policymaking, but it does not prescribe comparable deference on legal questions. The Court read that contrast to confirm that legal interpretation remains the reviewing court’s task.

Courts may still use agency interpretations as persuasive authority under Skidmore v. Swift & Co. Their persuasive force may depend on the agency’s expertise, the thoroughness and validity of its reasoning, and its consistency over time. And when the best reading of a statute actually delegates discretionary authority to an agency, courts must honor that delegation, define its boundaries, and review the agency’s exercise of discretion for reasoned decisionmaking.

Issue #2

Whether Chevron’s presumption that statutory ambiguity implicitly delegates interpretive authority to an administering agency is compatible with the APA.

Holding

No. Chevron’s presumption conflicts with the APA because ambiguity does not itself constitute a congressional delegation of authority to agencies.

Reasoning

Chevron required courts first to determine whether Congress had directly addressed the precise issue. If the statute was silent or ambiguous, Chevron’s second step required courts to accept any permissible agency interpretation, even if the court thought another interpretation was better. The Court held that this command cannot be reconciled with the APA’s direction that courts themselves decide legal questions.

Statutory ambiguity may arise for many reasons, including imprecise drafting, unforeseen circumstances, or legislative compromise. It does not reliably show that Congress intended to transfer the judicial task of resolving legal ambiguity to an agency. Courts routinely resolve ambiguities in statutes outside the administrative context, using ordinary interpretive tools rather than declaring multiple non-best readings permissible.

Agency expertise does not justify a categorical transfer of interpretive authority. Technical factual premises and agency experience can be highly useful and can make an agency’s view persuasive. But courts regularly interpret technical statutes, have the benefit of party briefing and agency explanations, and are institutionally charged with resolving questions of law.

Nor is statutory interpretation transformed into policymaking merely because an agency is involved. Courts must distinguish legal interpretation from genuine delegations of policy discretion. Where Congress has delegated policymaking discretion through terms such as “appropriate,” “reasonable,” or an express grant to define statutory terms, courts must respect the agency’s authorized choices. Chevron erred by treating every unresolved interpretive question as if it were such a delegation.

Issue #3

Whether Chevron should nevertheless be retained under stare decisis.

Holding

No. Chevron’s flawed reasoning, unworkability, and weak reliance interests provide special justification to overrule it.

Reasoning

Chevron radically changed administrative-law review without addressing the APA, the statute governing judicial review of agency action. Its premise—that ambiguity generally signals an implied delegation of interpretive authority—was mistaken from the start and led the Court to impose a growing set of exceptions and limitations.

Chevron proved unworkable because its central trigger, statutory ambiguity, lacked a stable legal definition. Courts struggled to determine how much clarity was necessary at step one and faced increasingly complex threshold inquiries, including whether Chevron applied at all, whether the agency used qualifying procedures, and whether the issue was a major question.

The doctrine did not create the kind of settled reliance that ordinarily counsels preservation of precedent. Its application had become inconsistent, the Court had not relied on Chevron deference since 2016, and Chevron allowed agencies to replace one reasonable interpretation with another without any statutory change. That flexibility could destabilize rather than protect settled expectations.

Overruling Chevron does not itself unsettle prior decisions that upheld specific agency actions under Chevron, including Chevron’s own holding concerning the Clean Air Act. Those decisions remain subject to ordinary statutory stare decisis. But future courts must apply the APA’s independent-judgment requirement rather than Chevron’s mandatory deference framework.

Concurrences

Justice Thomas

Reasoning

Justice Thomas joined the Court’s APA analysis but wrote separately to emphasize that Chevron was unconstitutional as well as unlawful under the APA. In his view, Article III’s judicial power requires judges to exercise independent judgment in interpreting the law, so Chevron improperly compelled courts to accept agency interpretations they believed were wrong.

Chevron also improperly expanded executive power. By allowing agencies to give controlling meaning to ambiguous laws, it effectively transferred judicial interpretive power to the Executive Branch. Recharacterizing Chevron as deference to agency policymaking would not solve the problem, because that account would instead raise the concern that agencies were exercising legislative power reserved to Congress.

For Justice Thomas, Chevron thus undermined the separation of powers in both directions: it stripped courts of a core judicial function and let executive agencies exercise powers that the Constitution assigns elsewhere. Overruling Chevron restores an important structural protection for individual liberty.

Justice Gorsuch

Reasoning

Justice Gorsuch joined the Court’s opinion and focused on stare decisis. He argued that the common-law tradition treats precedent as evidence of the law rather than as a source of authority that can override the Constitution or statutes. A precedent deserves respect based on the quality of its reasoning, its fit with related law, its workability, and reliance interests—not because judges must perpetuate a legal error.

Chevron conflicted with the APA’s express instruction that reviewing courts decide legal questions and interpret statutes. In Justice Gorsuch’s view, the doctrine rested on a judicially invented fiction that Congress silently delegated legal interpretive authority to agencies whenever statutory language was ambiguous. Courts have no authority to elevate such a fiction over Congress’s enacted command.

He also maintained that Chevron departed from the Nation’s longstanding understanding of the judicial role. Traditional practice gave executive constructions respectful consideration, especially when contemporaneous and consistent, but did not require courts to accept every reasonable agency interpretation or permit agencies to displace judicial precedent through later interpretations.

Justice Gorsuch further stressed Chevron’s conflict with due process and separation-of-powers principles. It allowed agencies to act as effective judges of the scope of their own authority, tilted litigation toward the Government, and enabled changing administrations to alter legal obligations without Congress changing the governing statute.

Finally, he concluded that Chevron was both unworkable and destructive of reliance. The doctrine’s uncertain tests for ambiguity, delegation, and reasonableness produced confusion, while its allowance for agencies to adopt successive reasonable interpretations created regulatory instability for ordinary people. In his view, stare decisis required the Court to correct, rather than preserve, that error.

Dissents

Justice Kagan

Reasoning

Justice Kagan, joined by Justice Sotomayor and by Justice Jackson in the companion Relentless case, argued that Chevron properly allocates authority when Congress has left a genuine ambiguity or gap in a statute administered by an agency. A court first uses all ordinary interpretive tools to determine whether Congress has supplied an answer. Only when Congress has not done so does Chevron allow the agency to select a reasonable interpretation.

Chevron rests on a realistic presumption about congressional intent. Congress knows that regulatory statutes will contain ambiguities, whether intentionally or through the limits of drafting and foresight. When Congress assigns an agency responsibility for administering a regulatory scheme but does not specify who should resolve an open interpretive issue, Congress would generally prefer the agency over a court because the agency has expertise, experience with the statutory program, and political accountability through the President.

Many Chevron questions require scientific knowledge, technical understanding, detailed familiarity with an interdependent regulatory system, or policy judgments about competing values. Justice Kagan illustrated the point with questions about what qualifies as a protein, when a wildlife population is distinct, how to define a geographic area for Medicare reimbursement, and how to balance pollution reduction against economic growth. In her view, agencies are better equipped and more legitimate than courts to make those determinations.

The APA does not forbid Chevron deference. Section 706 directs courts to decide questions of law but does not prescribe de novo review of agency statutory interpretations. A court applying Chevron still decides the legal question by determining whether Congress spoke directly and, if not, whether the agency remained within the range of reasonable interpretations. The APA’s text, its legislative history, and judicial practice around its enactment were compatible with deference.

Justice Kagan disputed the majority’s historical account. In the years before and after the APA, the Court sometimes deferred to agency interpretations, particularly in Gray v. Powell and NLRB v. Hearst Publications. Even if that pre-Chevron practice was less fully developed, it showed that the APA did not establish a categorical rule against deference.

Stare decisis, she concluded, strongly favored retaining Chevron. The doctrine had been applied in thousands of decisions and formed a background rule for Congress, agencies, regulated entities, and the public. Congress had repeatedly left Chevron in place despite knowing it could amend the APA or adopt contrary statutory instructions. The majority’s recent refusal to apply Chevron, she argued, could not itself become a reason for declaring the doctrine obsolete.

Justice Kagan also rejected the claim that Chevron was unworkable. Legal doctrine frequently turns on whether text is ambiguous, including contract interpretation, sovereign-immunity law, the rule of lenity, and constitutional avoidance. Chevron’s refinements generally reflected its underlying rationale by withholding deference where Congress likely would not have wanted agency primacy. The decision to overrule Chevron, she warned, would disrupt settled agency constructions and make courts the dominant decisionmakers over technical and policy-laden regulatory questions.