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16 Vill. Envtl. L.J. 1 (2005)
Chevron Matters: How the Chevron Doctrine Redefined the Roles of Congress, Courts and Agencies in Environmental Law

handle is hein.journals/vilenvlj16 and id is 7 raw text is: VILLANOVA ENVIRONMENTAL LAW JOURNAL VOLUME XVI 2005 NUMBER 1 CHEVRON MATTERS: HOW THE CHEVRON DOCTRINE REDEFINED THE ROLES OF CONGRESS, COURTS AND AGENCIES IN ENVIRONMENTAL LAW E. DONALD ELLIOTT* Has the Chevron' doctrine really affected the way that adminis- trative lawyers think, how courts decide cases and how agencies be- have? As recent as 1991, a co-author and I described Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (Chevron) as merely a significant but subtle change in legal doctrine.2 In his oral presentation at this symposium, Professor Peter Shane was * Professor (adjunct) of Law, Yale Law School and Georgetown University Law Center; Partner, Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, Washington, D.C. Professor Elliott was General Counsel of EPA during the first Bush administration, 1989-1991. 1. Chevron, Inc. v. Natural Res. Def. Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837, 842-45 (1984) (deferring to agency interpretation of its governing statute when Congress fails to explicitly express its intent). Of course, no case stands alone. There were precursors to Chevron including Train v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 421 U.S. 60 (1975), and Chevron would have had no meaning. if it had not been followed in subsequent cases. Any case is both an epiphenomenon and a partial cause of what comes later. An opinion, particularly a Supreme Court opinion, represents and exemplifies underlying trends in the law, but also by reifying these trends in a particular text, it becomes a causal factor influencing subsequent devel- opments. Unless the context indicates otherwise, references to Chevron through- out this article should be understood to refer to what is sometimes called the Chevron doctrine, the legal principles for defining deference in statutory construc- tions between courts and agencies, as stated in Chevron and refined in subsequent cases. See, e.g., INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421 (1987); United States v. Mead Corp., 533 U.S. 218 (2001). It would be a fine topic for an article to address how the legal tests stated in the Chevron case differ from those in other cases, both before and after. In fact, many such articles have already been written. That is not the topic of this article, which is concerned instead with how the Chevron doctrine as a whole has affected the relationships of courts and agencies, particularly in the environmental area. 2. Peter H. Schuck & E. Donald Elliott, To the Chevron Station: An Empirical Study of Federal Administrative Law, 1990 DuKE L.J. 984, 1026 (1991) (analyzing sta- tistical data that offered support for proposition that Chevron caused subtle change in statutory interpretation and administrative law).

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