Free Republic

The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday in two related cases challenging a 40-year-old precedent that requires courts to defer to the judgment of federal agencies in administrative law cases. At the end of three-and-a-half hours of arguments, a majority seemed disposed to overturn Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council, and consign the so-called "Chevron deference" principle to the compost heap of terrible Supreme Court precedents.Ever since the creation of the administrative state during the administration of our first socialist president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, federal agencies have assumed the authority to interpret federal statutes pretty much as they please. This became...

When Justice John Paul Stephens issued his 1984 opinion in Chevron U.S.A. v. National Resources Defense Council, he started what legal scholar Gary Lawson later called “nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution.” At long last, on Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear two cases that may signal the beginning of the end to that revolution. Article I of the Constitution explicitly directs that “All legislative Power herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States,” not regulatory agencies. Yet Justice Stephens’ opinion found that “agenc[ies] may . . . properly rely upon the incumbent administration’s views...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to take up a case involving the Trump-era ban on "bump stocks" that was initiated in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting. The justices agreed to hear arguments early next year over the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) rule, which was implemented in 2017. The case pertains to whether the Department of Justice, which oversees the ATF, followed federal law in changing the regulation around bump stocks, which are able to increase the rate of fire in some semiautomatic weapons. Federal appeals courts have come to different decisions...

The Supreme Court has scarcely filled its docket for the 2023-24 term, but it is already shaping up to a major term for administrative law. Among the cases accepted for next term with potentially significant implications for administrative law are the following: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America—Whether the court of appeals erred in holding that the statute providing funding to the CFPB violates the appropriations clause in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, and in vacating a regulation promulgated at a time when the Bureau was receiving such funding. (I wrote about the...

What if I told you the Supreme Court often does too little, not too much? That accusation usually comes from liberals who see the judiciary as philosopher-kings enacting social justice over and against the will of a bigoted public. But a conservative case exists for making the same accusation, just on different grounds. For the Right, the court has abdicated too much of its power to the administrative state, letting its interpretations of law function over and above the justices’ constitutional power. That abdication may be ending. On Monday, the justices added to their docket Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo....