CHEVRON DOCTRINE OVERRULED

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo

A case involving fishing monitors has taken down the Chevron Doctrine, under which courts deferred to an agency’s statutory interpretation when statutes are silent or ambiguous.

On June 28, 2024, the Supreme Court issued its opinion on Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a case involving whether fishermen could be required to pay the wages of at-sea monitors/observers. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) administers the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) under a delegation from the Secretary of Commerce. The MSA is silent on whether Atlantic herring fishermen could be required to pay for observers permitted under the MSA. NMFS promulgated a rule that would require Atlantic herring fishermen to obtain and pay for observers in some instances.

Chief Judge Roberts, joined by Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett formed the majority. The Court 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 interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous; Chevron is overruled.”

The Chevron Doctrine required courts to defer to an agency’s statutory interpretation when statutes are silent or ambiguous. The thought being that agencies are filled with subject matter experts and statutes can never be written in a way to contemplate all scenarios or be without ambiguity.

Justice Kagan, in a dissenting opinion quoted Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U. S. 837, 865 (1984): “Judges are not experts in the field, and are not part of either political branch of the Government.” The majority was unmoved, writing: “The dissent ends by quoting Chevron: ‘Judges are not experts in the field.’ That depends, of course, on what the “field” is. If it is legal interpretation, that has been, “emphatically,” “the province and duty of the judicial department” for at least 221 years. The rest of the dissent’s selected epigraph is that judges “‘are not part of either political branch.’” Indeed. Judges have always been expected to apply their “judgment” independent of the political branches when interpreting the laws those branches enact. And one of those laws, the APA, bars judges from disregarding that responsibility just because an Executive Branch agency views a statute differently.” (citations omitted)

The majority found that an agency’s interpretation of a statue will be considered by courts but should not be treated with the deference called for under Chevron:

“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 happens 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.”  Bureau 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.”

To the argument that deferring to agency interpretation provides more consistency, the Court wrote: “Nor does a desire for the uniform construction of federal law justify Chevron. It is unclear how much the Chevron doctrine as a whole actually 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.”