Loper Bright

The event will discuss how the Loper and other court decisions “pose challenges for Congress in how it legislates and directs regulatory agencies. They also underscore existing concerns over congressional capacity, internal processes, and the legislative branch’s ability to tackle complex policy challenges. Last year, BPC established the Working Group on Congress, Courts, and Administrative Law to…

The EPA recently announced that it will formally reconsider its 2009 Endangerment Finding in which it deemed carbon dioxide, methane, and four other gases as “air pollutants,” as well as “all of its prior regulations and actions that rely on the Endangerment Finding.” That is a big deal because the Endangerment Finding has been used to justify…

Professors Kristin Hickman and Amy Wildermuth have a new article on Loper’s two buckets: “independent judgment for mere statutory interpretation and reasoned decisionmaking for exercises of delegated policymaking discretion.” Abstract By overturning Chevron, the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision clearly changed the way in which courts must approach agency actions interpreting statutes. But Loper Bright stopped well short of declaring…

Two cases interpreting the Fair Labor Standards Act in the federal courts in Texas  have applied the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision to overturn to two separate Department of Labor regulations. Tipped Employees In the first case, Restaurant Law Center v. U.S. Department of Labor, 120 F.4th 163 (5th Cir. 2024), the Fifth Circuit overruled…

Congress created the Council on Environmental Quality to serve as an advisory body that makes recommendations to the President on what environmental policy should be. But CEQ has long claimed power to issue binding regulations—also known as “legislative rules”—implementing the National Environmental Policy Act. The source of CEQ’s claimed power: not a duly enacted statute…

When the Supreme Court overruled Chevron last year in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Chief Justice John Roberts seemed at pains to limit the impact of upending the Chevron methodology to future cases.  He explained that Loper Bright “do[es] not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework.  The holdings of those…

One of the most interesting questions surrounding the implementation of Loper Bright is its impact on the statutory stare decisis of previous decisions that courts made under the Chevron framework. Elliot Setzer has this essay on the topic over at the Yale Notice & Comment blog: When the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine in Loper Bright Enterprises…

As we’ve discussed, Loper Bright has been changing the legal landscape as courts revisit and revise or uphold standards of review. Recently, the Eighth Circuit reviewed “the authority of the President and Secretary of Education, under existing law, to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars of loans made to borrowers to finance the cost of…

On February 19, President Trump issued an executive order titled Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Deregulatory Initiative.  In the EO, Trump directed agencies to review all regulations to identify those that may need to be revised or repealed to comply with the Constitution, existing law, court precedent, and the…

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo the Supreme Court overruled Chevron v. NRDC—which had required federal courts to defer to the government’s “reasonable” interpretation of ambiguous language in statutes—holding that “[c]ourts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the [Administrative Procedure Act] requires” and that “courts need not…