The Chevron Deference Doctrine was overturned by the Supreme Court today in a 6-3 decision in the Loper Bright v. Raimondo case. Chevron has been the law of the land since 1984, and ordered lower courts to recognize that federal agencies should be regarded as the experts where a law was ambiguous, and as a result caused Federal agencies to get ever more aggressive in their interpretation of underlying laws in making rules, without fear of a court overrruling their interpretation. This is a landmark decision against the Federal Government in their aggressive rulemaking which restricts the rights of not only OHV users, but also many other groups such as gun owners, the environment, the workplace and even health care.
Chief Justice delivered the decision today and said that Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the Administrative Procedure Act] requires, The chief justice called the earlier decision a “judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties.”
Chevron doctrine has been applied by lower courts in thousands of cases. The Supreme Court itself has invoked the framework to uphold agencies’ interpretations of statutes at least 70 times, but not since 2016, when the Court began to drift away from their conviction for the Doctrine.
This is definitely a landmark decision that will shift our fight against Federal overreaches in restricting responsible use of our public lands, and may lead to many new arguments against devastating rules such as the recently adopted BLM Landscape Health Rule that allows conservation leases and a host of other new rules not addressed by FLPMA.
If you’d like to read the court decision, you can find it here…
