John Chisholm Recounts Loper Bright After Two Years
By
| June 25, 2026
Santa Fe Institute and Foundation for Economic Education trustee John Chisholm in the Wall Street Journal revisiting Justice Kagan’s worry that ending Chevron deference would “cause a massive shock to the legal system.”
What about Justice Kagan’s warning? Two years on, no “massive shock” has materialized. Agencies still prevail in most challenges. Empirical studies put their win rate at roughly 75% when courts applied Chevron and near 60% on established rules since Loper Bright. The change has been evolutionary, not revolutionary, as agencies revise and defend their rules more carefully, rather than watch them swept away.
Overturning Chevron is often cast as a fight over control of the administrative state. It is better understood as a question about the quality of decision-making—whether a federal law is best interpreted by one, often partisan agency or by a distributed network of courts engaged in continuous, real-world discovery.
