Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo
The Supreme Court overruled its 1984 Chevron decision, ending a 40-year rule that required federal judges to defer to any reasonable agency interpretation whenever a law was silent or ambiguous.
The ruling fundamentally shifts power over the meaning of regulatory law from federal agencies back to courts, with sweeping implications for environmental, health-care, financial, and virtually every other area of federal regulation.
How it got here: Two separate groups of Atlantic herring fishing companies challenged the same federal observer-funding rule in different circuits; both the D.C. Circuit and the First Circuit upheld the rule under Chevron; the Supreme Court granted certiorari in both cases limited solely to the Chevron question.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Several small family-owned fishing companies that operate in the Atlantic herring fishery challenged a federal rule requiring them to pay for government-certified observers aboard their vessels — costs estimated to reduce annual returns by up to 20 percent. The companies argued that the law governing fishery management never authorized the agency to shift those costs onto the fishermen. Both the D.C. Circuit and the First Circuit upheld the rule, relying on the Chevron doctrine to defer to the agency's interpretation.
The question before the Court
Can federal courts be required to accept an agency's reading of an ambiguous law even when the court would reach a different conclusion on its own?
The Court's answer
No — courts cannot defer to an agency's reading of an ambiguous statute simply because it seems reasonable. The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) commands that courts "decide all relevant questions of law" and "interpret constitutional and statutory provisions," and it prescribes no deferential standard for legal questions — unlike the explicit deferential standards it sets for agency factfinding and policymaking. That command codified a tradition dating to the founding: courts exercise independent judgment on legal questions, giving respectful consideration to executive branch views but never surrendering their own judgment to them.
Chevron violated that command by requiring courts to abandon their best reading of a statute and accept any "permissible" agency interpretation whenever the text seemed ambiguous. The justification that statutory ambiguity reflects an implicit congressional delegation to the agency doesn't hold up: ambiguity is often unintentional, courts resolve ambiguous statutes without deferring to anyone when no agency is involved, and agencies have no special competence in the legal task of reading texts. Because both lower courts relied on Chevron, their rulings are vacated and the cases returned for reconsideration under the correct standard.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Every federal agency — from the EPA to the FDA to financial regulators — now faces a higher bar when defending how it reads the laws it enforces. Businesses, advocacy groups, and individuals challenging agency rules have a stronger foothold in court, because judges must decide independently what the law means rather than rubber-stamping the agency's reading as long as it seems reasonable.
What changes now
The two fishing-company cases go back to the lower courts to decide without Chevron deference whether the National Marine Fisheries Service actually had statutory authority to require industry-paid observers on Atlantic herring vessels — a question the Supreme Court expressly did not reach. More broadly, challenges to agency rules across the country will now proceed under a standard requiring courts to exercise independent legal judgment. The Court specified that prior decisions upholding specific agency actions under Chevron remain valid under stare decisis, but agency interpretations that were never judicially tested may now face new challenges.
What this does not decide
The ruling does not decide whether the specific observer-funding rule challenged by these fishing companies was actually authorized by the Magnuson-Stevens Act — that question goes back to lower courts. It also does not call into question prior judicial decisions that upheld specific agency actions as lawful under Chevron; those holdings remain good law under ordinary stare decisis principles.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas joined the majority fully but wrote separately to stress that Chevron also violates the Constitution's separation of powers — not just the APA — because it compels judges to abdicate their Article III duty of independent legal judgment and simultaneously transfers judicial interpretive power to executive agencies operating under Article II. He argued that these structural constitutional defects should not be overlooked even as the Court corrects the statutory problem.
Concurrence — Justice Gorsuch
Justice Gorsuch wrote at length on why the doctrine of stare decisis — properly understood in its traditional common-law form — actually supports overruling Chevron. He traced the common-law tradition that judges find law rather than make it, argued that Chevron was an aberrational departure from centuries of practice that never commanded the endorsement of many judicial generations, catalogued real-world harms Chevron caused ordinary people (including a disabled veteran and immigrants), and concluded that Chevron's promise of predictability was always a fiction.
Dissent — Justice Kagan
Justice Kagan argued that Chevron correctly reflected what Congress would want when a statute it has charged an agency with implementing contains an ambiguity or gap — because agencies have subject-matter expertise, regulatory experience, and democratic accountability that courts lack. She contended that APA § 706 neither requires nor forbids deference, that pre-APA practice supported deferential review, and that overruling this deeply entrenched precedent — cited in over 18,000 judicial decisions — violates stare decisis without the required special justification and will cause massive disruption to settled regulatory arrangements.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began with constitutional and historical foundations: Article III assigns courts the duty to decide cases and interpret laws. Since Marbury v. Madison (1803), it has been the 'province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.' Courts have always given respectful consideration to executive branch interpretations — giving them 'great weight' when long-standing and consistent — but that respect never meant binding deference; a judge was 'not at liberty to surrender, or to waive' independent judgment.
- Congress codified this tradition in 1946 when it enacted the APA. Section 706 directs that 'the reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions' — and prescribes no deferential standard for doing so. Notably, Section 706 does require deferential review of agency policymaking (arbitrary-and-capricious standard) and factfinding (substantial-evidence standard), but it says nothing similar for legal questions. That deliberate omission shows Congress meant courts to apply their own judgment on questions of law.
- Chevron, decided in 1984 without even mentioning the APA, required courts to accept any 'permissible' agency interpretation whenever a statute was silent or ambiguous — the exact opposite of what Section 706 commands. Chevron justified this with a presumption that statutory ambiguity reflects an implicit congressional delegation to the agency. The Court rejected that presumption: ambiguity is often unintentional, courts resolve ambiguous statutes in non-agency cases all the time without deferring to anyone, and agencies have no special competence in the inherently legal task of resolving textual ambiguity.
- The Court also rejected the government's three main defenses of Chevron: (1) Agency expertise doesn't justify blanket deference because courts already have the agency's analysis before them and can weigh it — expertise can inform a court's judgment without controlling it. (2) Uniformity doesn't justify it because Chevron's inconsistent application produced less, not more, uniformity. (3) The idea that resolving statutory ambiguity is really 'policymaking' suited to agencies rests on a 'profound misconception of the judicial role' — interpretation is a legal task, not a political one.
- Stare decisis — the principle of adhering to precedent — did not require keeping Chevron. The factors that matter most all cut against it: Chevron's reasoning was flawed from the start because it never grappled with the APA; it proved unworkable because 'ambiguity' has no consistent definition and the Court spent four decades piling on exceptions and refinements; and it never generated real reliance interests — instead, it actively destroyed them by allowing agencies to reverse interpretations with each new administration, leaving regulated parties in 'an eternal fog of uncertainty.'
- Going forward, courts must exercise independent judgment on every question of statutory meaning, consistent with the APA. Courts may still give weight to agency interpretations based on their thoroughness, consistency, and reasoning — the standard from Skidmore v. Swift & Co. (1944), which the Court reaffirmed. When a statute genuinely delegates discretionary authority to an agency, courts must identify and respect that delegation. But deference to any 'permissible' reading solely because a statute seems ambiguous is no longer permitted.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Overrules Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (467 U.S. 837)
The 40-year rule requiring courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes is eliminated.
Reaffirms Skidmore v. Swift & Co. (323 U.S. 134)
Courts may still weigh agency interpretations based on their thoroughness, reasoning, and consistency, without being bound by them.