The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a group of New Jersey herring fishers’ challenge to a long-standing key administrative law doctrine—the “Chevron doctrine.” It could be the next term’s most consequential case. The Chevron doctrine requires federal courts to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretations of their governing statutes where the text of those statutes is ambiguous. As one of the most-cited Supreme Court cases, Chevron has been instrumental in administrative law practice over the past forty years. It has also become a primary target for several of the Court’s conservative justices.
In the case now before the Court, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Case No. 22-451, herring fisher appellants assert that the lower courts improperly applied the Chevron doctrine when they upheld a National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) regulation requiring them to pay a portion of the salary of a third-party compliance monitor onboard their boats. While no party questions NMFS’s authority to require that fishing vessels “carry” a federal or third-party observer onboard, the fishers challenge the agency’s power to force them to pay those observers up to approximately 20 percent of a vessel’s annual returns.
The fishers petitioned the Supreme Court to determine whether NMFS is implicitly authorized under the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA)1 to pass these enforcement costs onto industry and separately to either clarify that silence does not create “ambiguity” in a statute for purposes of triggering Chevron deference, or to discard Chevron doctrine altogether. The Court granted certiorari on only the second question, and the consequences for federal environmental law could be vast. Until recently, federal agencies have routinely relied upon the Chevron doctrine when defending their regulations.
No comments:
Post a Comment