The US Supreme Court issued its decision June 28 overruling the 40-year old Chevron deference, which required courts to defer to agency’s reasonable interpretations of ambiguous or silent statutes. So what is a regulated party to do now?
Number 1: Don’t panic. Just because a rule was previously upheld under Chevron doesn’t automatically mean it will be overturned.
Not every Administrative Procedure Act case was a Chevron case—Chevron only applied when an agency interpreted an ambiguous or silent statute, and even then, only in a comparatively formal manner. Chevron never applied where Congress expressly delegated an issue to an agency; where an agency’s interpretation came in informal, non-binding guidance; or where the agency was interpreting its own regulation.
Nor are the 70 Supreme Court cases or thousands of circuit court decisions holding “that specific agency actions are lawful” necessarily at risk of being…
