Subscribe to Recasting Regulations to Sign up for Loper Bright Updates.
"*" indicates required fields
Advisory Opinions host Sarah Isgur has an essay at The Atlantic where she discusses the Supreme Court’s project “to shrink the presidency back to size and force 535 people to figure out a lasting solution to our problems, one that everyone can live with.” Although the Court’s recent decision striking down President Trump’s IEEPA tariffs was the impetus for the article, Isgur includes Loper Bright‘s impact. She wrote:
The 2024 Loper Bright decision, which held that executive-branch agencies no longer get to define the scope of their own authority, also stripped power from the executive branch. So did the vaccine-mandate case (Biden) in 2022 and the tax-records case (Trump) in 2020. This is a through line across administrations.
At the same time, the Court is putting the president more fully in charge of his branch of government. In that sense, Trump is winning. In Trump v. Slaughter, which involves the question of whether presidents can fire members of so-called independent agencies, the Court appears poised to let him have more direct control over those agencies and their personnel to execute his preferred policies. But that’s only after the justices, in Loper Bright, took power away from those agencies and handed it back to Congress, where it belonged. Trump will be a more powerful president over a weaker presidency.
Americans for Prosperity Foundation applauds the Trump EPA’s decision to repeal the agency’s 2009 Endangerment Finding—a document the agency has used as a springboard to claim sweeping power under the Clean Air Act to unilaterally set national transportation and energy policy by administrative edict without Congress’s permission. The Endangerment Finding has underpinned a host of burdensome and expensive EPA regulations impacting the entire national economy and the daily lives of Americans, including the price we pay for basic consumer goods. By repealing it, President Trump, Administrator Zeldin, and EPA have taken yet another bold step to unleash prosperity, restore American energy dominance, and lower costs. As the Washington Post Editorial Board said, supporting the decision, “It’s about time.” This historic deregulatory action will make buying a new car more affordable and save over a trillion dollars in costs.
(more…)
The New Civil Liberties Alliance’s podcast, “Unwritten Law,” has released a new episode that explores the arguments presented in seven amicus briefs recently filed at the First Circuit in Relentless v. Department of Commerce, the companion case to Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. American for Prosperity Foundation’s brief is one of the seven discussed.
From NCLA:
In this episode of Unwritten Law, NCLA Senior Litigation Counsel John Vecchione and NCLA President Mark Chenoweth discuss a major development in NCLA’s challenge to a federal rule requiring fishermen to pay for government monitors placed on their boats—despite no clear statutory authorization.
After a district court upheld the rule using a theory that conflicts with the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright, NCLA appealed to the First Circuit. Now, seven separate amicus briefs—from across the legal and ideological spectrum—have weighed in, each highlighting a different flaw in the district court’s analysis.
John and Mark walk through the most compelling arguments from the amici, including post-Loper Bright de novo review, the misuse of “necessary and appropriate” authority, clear-statement rules, the Major Questions Doctrine, constitutional limits on agency power, and why reviving Chevron-era reasoning under new labels is not permissible.
Listen to the episode here, or watch it on YouTube:
An interesting question after Loper Bright is how the demise of Chevron deference intersects with other deference doctrines that are still on the books, albeit perhaps on life support, such as Auer deference (which allows courts to defer to agency interpretations of their own regulations) and Stinson deference (which teaches that courts should defer to Sentencing Commission commentary on federal sentencing guidelines).
(more…)
The Federalist Society is hosting a webinar on the “Nondelegation and the Limits of Agency Authority after Consumers’ Research and Loper Bright” next Friday, January 23 at 2:00 PM ET. Details and registration link below:
The panel will discuss the questions left open—or raised—by the Supreme Court’s decisions in FCC v. Consumers’ Research and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, about the proper approach to statutory construction and the role that the nondelegation doctrine should play as a background principle in statutory analysis in cases where an agency has claimed broad authority to weigh competing public values when promulgating legislative rules.
Featuring:
- Prof. Jonathan Adler, Tazewell Taylor Professor of Law and William H. Cabell Research Professor, William & Mary Law School; Senior Fellow, Property and Environment Research Center
- Prof. Ilan Wurman, Julius E. Davis Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School
- (Moderator) Adam White, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Director, Scalia Law’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State
The Federalist Society is hosting a webinar on the “Loper Bright Fallout for SEC Rulemaking” next Tuesday, January 20 at 12:00 PM ET. Details and registration link below:
In an unprecedented action, the SEC in July dismissed with prejudice a pending enforcement case concerning an alleged violation of a rule promulgated under the Investment Company Act of 1940 (ICA). In 2023, the SEC had charged the defendants (a mutual fund, its investment advisor, and independent directors of the fund) with violating its 2016 “liquidity rule,” which limits the percentage of assets investment companies may hold in “illiquid” investments. The independent directors argued that the ICA did not authorize the SEC to make rules concerning fund liquidity and that its decision to do so based on a protection of investors rationale was owed no deference under the 2024 Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright.
The district court ordered supplemental briefing on Loper Bright implications, but before the SEC filed its supplemental response, it dismissed the case against all defendants, citing “policy reasons”, without more explanation.
Our panelists will discuss the numerous legal and policy issues and questions raised by this sequence of events.
Featuring:
(Moderator) Michael Piwowar, Executive Vice President, Milken Institute Finance
Jan Folena, Partner and Co-Chair of Securities & Regulatory Enforcement, Stradley Ronon
Margaret Little, Senior Litigation Counsel, New Civil Liberties Alliance
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will consider for the first time two cert petitions at its conference presenting Loper Bright-related questions. A third, more tangentially Loper Bright-related petition will return as a relist.
(more…)
Earlier this month, a group of Republican U.S. Senators, led by Ted Cruz (Texas) and Mike Lee (Utah), sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) discouraging the agency from moving forward with a proposal to reallocate exempted renewable volume obligations pursuant to the agency’s Renewal Fuel Standard program. Loper Bright figured prominently in the coalition letter and, specifically, the legislators’ argument that Congress’s failure to authorize such reallocation by statute deprived the EPA of authority to do so in the face of statutory silence.
(more…)
AFP Foundation’s Michael Pepson mentioned Lesko v. United States as a case to watch for understanding how Loper Bright might guide restraint over agency authority without Chevron deference earlier this year. At the time, the Federal Circuit had ordered en banc review to reconsider whether the Court of Federal Claims correctly upheld the Office of Personnel Management’s (“OPM”) overtime regulations. Last week, the full Circuit ruled in favor of OPM after applying the new Loper Bright paradigm for judicial review.
(more…)
AFP Foundation Files Amicus Brief in Relentless v. Department of Commerce
Americans for Prosperity Foundation (“AFPF”) has filed an amicus brief in Relentless v. Department of Commerce—the companion case to the historic Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. With Loper Bright held in abeyance on remand, the outcome in Relentless may have significant implications for proper implementation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act (“MSA”), as well as the understanding of de novo review in the post-Chevron administrative‑law landscape.
(more…)