Dorf on Law

If you've followed the Roberts Court for a while, you probably weren't too surprised to hear that the Loper Bright v. Raimondo decision overruled Chevron v. NRDC .  (If administrative law isn't your thing, my earlier blog post includes a brief Chevron primer.)  Courts, Loper Bright tells us, should not defer to agencies' interpretations of the statutes they administer, not even if the statutes are ambiguous. Statutory interpretation is the province of courts, and the judiciary should not relinquish that role to agencies.   As I discuss in my previous post, Loper Bright is of a piece with other Roberts Court administrative-law decisions, so from one perspective it seems like the predictable product of a conservative Court. The New York Times ' commentary on Loper Bright noted that curbing the administrative state has been a long-time goal of the conservative legal movement.  Given that conservatives dominate today's Court, we shouldn't be surprised tha

The US Supreme Court's immunity decision , released yesterday, was even worse than almost anyone expected.  It has already led to a flood of analysis, the best of which was Professor Dorf's column here yesterday afternoon.  Because he did the heavy lifting by reading and commenting on the Court's terrible decision (as well as the very good dissents), I consider myself liberated from having to engage in case analysis.  Instead, I will ask what happens next, focusing on the most extreme possibilities. To put my reactions here into some context, I should note that yesterday was especially meaningful for me personally.  As I noted in a column almost a year ago, I had long since come to the conclusion that the US is doomed politically, which in turn led me to negotiate an early retirement from my position as a professor at the University of Florida.  At that point, I did what many people often idly threaten to do: I moved to Canada.  Although it was unclear at the time whether

The majority opinion of Chief Justice Roberts in Trump v. United States contains two inter-related fundamental flaws. First, echoing a grandiose statement during the oral argument by Justice Gorsuch that the Court must write "a rule for the ages," the majority in Trump  sees its role primarily as one of setting a precedent for all potential future Presidents. The Court worries that if it provides Trump with insufficient immunity it will give rise to "an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors . . . ." Never mind that that is not what's happening here, given that the President's appointed Attorney General was highly reluctant to proceed with the prosecution and then assigned the task to a special counsel. What's most galling about that statement and the entire opinion is the not-at-all-tacit assumption that Trump was a normal President. Yes, of course the Court needs to announce rules

The Court's decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo overruling Chevron marks a sea change in administrative law, but commentators have already disagreed about whether the decision is a big deal.  (For more on Loper Bright , see Mike's excellent blog post asking whether Congress could reinstate Chevron .)  A doctrinal about-face in a crucial area of law  seems like a big deal, but what might be some reasons its importance is overstated?  (For readers who don't usually follow administrative law, here's a very brief primer.  In its 1984 decision, Chevron v. NRDC , the Court announced a two-step test to determine whether courts should defer to administrative agency interpretations of statutes agencies administer.  Under step one, courts asked if the statute is clear.  If it was, then agencies were obliged to follow it; agencies didn't get any deference.  If the statute, by contrast, were ambiguous, then courts were to defer to reasonable agency interpretations.  In other