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              Con gressionaI
                 Research Servic






Chevron at the Bar: Supreme Court to Hear

Challenges to Chevron Deference



October 26, 2023

In what has the potential to be one of the most consequential decisions in administrative law, the Supreme
Court is scheduled to evaluate the constitutionality of the Chevron framework in its 2023 term in a pair of
cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce. The
Chevron doctrine requires federal courts to defer to a federal agency's reasonable interpretation of
ambiguous statutory provisions the agency administers.
For the better part of four decades, Chevron has been one of the foundational decisions in administrative
law, governing the relationship between agencies and courts in matters of statutory interpretation and
acting as a backdrop against which Congress has legislated. As one scholar put it: Chevron is the most
talked about, most written about, most cited administrative law decision of the Supreme Court. Ever. For
the past decade or so, however, Chevron has come under increasing fire from some corners of the federal
judiciary and legal academia. Once cited often and approvingly by a majority of Supreme Court Justices,
Chevron appears to have recently fallen into desuetude at the Court. Over the past several terms the Court
has declined to apply or even cite Chevron in cases where it may once have governed. Other methods of
statutory interpretation, such as the major questions doctrine, appear to have displaced Chevron, at least in
some instances. Chevron's absence at the Court has not gone unnoticed either, with several Justices
commenting  on Chevron's absence as evidence that it should be overruled.
Both Loper and Relentless raise the same challenge to a decision by the National Marine Fisheries Service
(NMFS)  to require commercial fishing vessels to pay for observers to ensure compliance with regulations
governing the herring fishery in the Atlantic. NMFS issued the regulation based on its interpretation of the
Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), which empowers  NMFS  through delegated authority from the
Department of Commerce to regulate commercial fishing. The petitioners-four fishing companies in
Loper and two vessel owners in Relentless-contend that the MSA is silent on whether NMFS has
authority to impose industry-funded monitoring. The petitioners ask the Court to overrule Chevron or,
short of that, to limit its application in situations where a statute is silent concerning controversial
powers expressly ... granted elsewhere in the statute. As Loper and Relentless raise the same challenge to
the same agency action, for the purposes of describing the statutory and procedural background, this
Sidebar will only refer to the Loper appeal.


                                                                Congressional Research Service
                                                                  https://crsreports.congress.gov
                                                                                     LSB11061

CRS Legal Sidebar
Prepared for Members and
Committees of Congress

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