Childress Law, PLLC reposted this
Big ruling today from SCOTUS. Federal agencies like USDOT and FMCSA will no longer be afforded the deference they had received from federal courts when it comes to interpretations of the legislation underpinning their administrative actions. Instead, federal judges will now decide what Congress meant by their directives when an agency is challenged on its administration of those laws it’s tasked with administering.
This morning, the Supreme Court overturned its 40-year old Chevron decision. The Court ruled that federal courts no longer have to give deference to agency interpretations of statutes those agencies administer. In Chevron, the Supreme Court had held that where a statute is ambiguous or silent on a specific issue, the interpretation of that statute should be in the hands of the federal agency tasked with administering it, not with the courts. As long as the agency’s interpretation of the statutory gaps is reasonable, a court should uphold it and not impose its own statutory construction to fill those gaps. Such deference to the agency, which has been called Chevron deference, was rooted in the idea that Congress tasks agencies with implementing statutes and in the assumption that agencies are more expert than courts in the statutes they are charged with administering. Today's decision ends this agency deference and increases the chance of successfully challenging regulations. Statutory interpretation and regulatory policy will increasingly be in the hands of federal judges, who - while generally well-qualified - have varying levels of expertise in any particular regulatory field. The Court explicitly noted that holdings in cases that relied on the Chevron precedent remain lawful and intact and are still subject to stare decisis "despite our change in interpretive methodology." That settles a question commentators had about whether the Court's expected overturning of Chevron would result in the reopening and relitigation of thousands of cases. It does not. https://lnkd.in/eV2MZJen