Last Wednesday, over the course of three and a half hours of arguments, the conservative and liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court jousted over whether to overrule a 40-year-old case called Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council.
The Chevron case is famous among lawyers—it’s among the most cited cases of all time—because it established the principle that the courts should defer to federal agencies when they interpret the law in the course of carrying out their duties. That may not sound like a big deal, but it is. Chevron shields the executive branch from overly intrusive court review, giving it the flexibility to do its work.
But the case is under threat. Conservative justices on the Supreme Court want to dismantle Chevron, believing that deference is improper because courts—not federal agencies—ought to say what the law is. They may have the votes to scrap the case outright; if not, they will almost certainly narrow its scope.
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Wherever the truth lies, ditching Chevron is only one part of the conservative legal movement’s ever more successful campaign to intensify judicial controls over the administrative state. In recent years, the justices have produced a new “major questions doctrine” to restrain agencies that do things of great economic or political significance. They have toyed with telling Congress that some of its delegations are so broad as to be unconstitutional. They are exploring new limits on the types of cases that agencies can resolve. And they seem to have upped the intensity with which they review whether agency decisions are “arbitrary.”
Headline is NOT about Chevron the company, but Chevron the legal decision.
Shit title
Well, the legal paradigm is called ‘Chevron deference’.
The percentage of the United States population, who have a working understanding of the Supreme Court decision Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. Is pretty small.
People should explain what’s going on
Chevron? You mean the oil company previously known as Exxon until they had a little boating accident in Alaska?
Exxon still exists, they just merged with Mobil and are now ExxonMobil. Chevron is an entirely different company.
They were all split off from Standard Oil, but then they were basically allowed to reform a duopoly again when the Conservatives got back in charge of antitrust enforcement.
True, but it’s completely inaccurate to say that “Exxon rebranded as Chevron,” which is what I was responding to.
Sorry I wasn’t intending to imply that you were wrong. I just find it interesting that they were split off of off the original monopoly.
It’s originally about Chevron the company lol. The original Supreme Court case that set the modern precedent was Chevron (the company) vs. Natural Resources Defense Council. That case allowed the EPA to do things like determine safe levels for things like lead in water, particulate matter in air, etc. without explicitly having a whole ass court argument over each and every number that they wanted to set.
Overturning the original Chevron case will literally dismantle the entire regulatory process in the United States.
There is room to overhaul Chevron, reducing the degree of deference, without completely reversing it. Chevron isn’t particularly great law when it comes to a corrupt or incompetent eexecutive agency like Ajit Pai’s FCC.