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1 1 (October 26, 2023)

handle is hein.crs/govengt0001 and id is 1 raw text is: 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