Loper Bright

Yesterday, Loper Bright took center stage in an oral argument before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals: A three-judge panel of Washington, D.C.’s high court at oral arguments Wednesday investigated how the US Supreme Court’s new agency deference standard applies to courts in the district as part of a dispute over a $5.9 million…

Lawrence J. Spiwak, President of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies, writes on the FedSoc Blog that the “FCC still can’t interpret Section 230:” Which brings me to proponents of the FCC’s power to interpret Section 230. About a month after I wrote my original post, Seth Cooper of the…

Bloomberg Law’s UnCommon Law podcast continues its series on the “story behind the fishing industry’s Chevron doctrine challenge:” This season on UnCommon Law, we’re exploring the limits of agency power. To what extent are federal agencies authorized to create and implement regulations that aren’t explicitly mandated by Congress? And what happens when an agency goes too far?…

Joseph A. D’Angelo from the Florida International University College of Law published “Chevron Solutions: Restoring the Separation of Powers in a Post-Chevron Landscape” in the University of Florida’s Journal of Law and Public Policy: The erosion of congressional authority in the face of expanding executive power, particularly through administrative agencies, is of critical importance. A…

In U.S. v. Bricker, the Sixth Circuit grappled with whether the Sentencing Commission could use a policy statement to expand the scope of the federal compassionate release statute, which authorizes early release for “extraordinary and compelling reasons,” to cover nonretroactive changes in sentencing law, when the en banc Sixth Circuit previously reached the opposite conclusion.…

Finn Dobkin, a Senior Policy Analyst at the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center, published a working paper titled “Uncertain Authority,” examining recent legal and institutional changes surrounding the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)’s authority to issue binding National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) rules. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court ruled that…

Eli Nachmany has joined the discussion on the Yale Notice & Comment blog about the interaction between the APA’s good cause exception, Loper Bright, and the Trump Administration’s efforts to root out existing unlawful regulations: Cary Coglianese and Daniel Walters recently published an interesting Notice & Comment post about the President’s memorandum, suggesting that the move shows…

The Departments of the Interior and Commerce have proposed to rescind an Endangered Species Act rule defining “harm” because it “do[es] not accord with the single, best meaning of the statutory text” and instead they will “rest on the statutory definition of ‘take.’” This proposal is in line with a White House directive to remedy…

Cary Coglianese & Daniel E. Walters write in the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice & Comment blog: With the ink barely dry in Loper Bright, we are beginning to see just how unsettled, and how unpredictable, the administrative governance game can be in a post-Loper Bright world. With a new memorandum, “Directing the Repeal of Unlawful Regulations,”…

Earlier this week, on April 9, 2025, President Trump issued a new memorandum entitled “Directing the Repeal of Unlawful Regulations.”  The memo, which builds on directions set out in Executive Order 14219 (Feb. 19, 2025), instructs the heads of all executive branch agencies to prepare for repealing “facially unlawful regulations” after April 20, 2025.