Loper v. Raimondo: How the Supreme Court Ended Chevron

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, decided June 28, 2024, the Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference, the 40-year-old rule that required federal judges to accept an agency’s reading of an ambiguous statute as long as it was reasonable.¹ Courts now decide for themselves what a federal statute means. When an agency’s interpretation is challenged, a judge works out the best reading of the law independently rather than deferring to the agency that wrote the rule.

What Chevron Deference Was

The framework came from a 1984 case, Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. It set up a two-step test. A court first asked whether Congress had directly addressed the issue. If the statute was clear, that ended the matter. If the statute was silent or ambiguous, the court moved to step two and had to accept the agency’s interpretation so long as it was “reasonable.”²

The idea was that agency experts in fields like environmental science, financial markets, and drug safety understood technical questions better than generalist judges, and that letting them fill statutory gaps gave the government room to adapt without waiting for Congress. Chevron became one of the most cited decisions in American administrative law and shaped thousands of lower court rulings.

Critics said the rule let agencies expand their own authority into space Congress never clearly granted, and that each new administration could reinterpret the same statute in a new direction while courts went along with both readings. That instability was a central grievance the Supreme Court took up in Loper Bright.

What the Court Held

The Court overturned Chevron in a 6-2 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused from Loper Bright because she had sat on it as a lower court judge, but she joined the dissent in the companion case, Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, making the combined vote 6-3.¹

The majority rested on two grounds. The first was the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 706, which says a reviewing court “shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action.”³ The Court read that as a command that judges use their own judgment on questions of law, and treated Chevron’s step two as an abdication of that duty.

The second was Article III of the Constitution, which vests “the judicial Power” in the federal courts.⁴ Saying what a law means, the Court held, is a core judicial function that cannot be handed to the executive branch. Policy expertise does not translate into interpretive authority. In the majority’s words, “agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities.”¹

The Dissent

Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissent, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She argued that discarding a 40-year-old precedent embedded in thousands of rulings was the opposite of judicial modesty, and noted that Congress had “spurned multiple opportunities” to overturn Chevron by statute, which she read as tacit acceptance of the framework.¹

Kagan also predicted the practical consequences. Chevron’s structured test, she wrote, had actually reduced partisan splits among judges by constraining them from substituting their own preferences for an agency’s. Without it, “a predictable effect of overruling Chevron would be to ensure a far greater role for judicial policy preferences in statutory interpretation and far more common splits along ideological lines.”¹

On the APA point, Kagan noted that the majority itself acknowledged Section 706 was meant to restate existing judicial review practice rather than create new rules. Because deference to agency expertise was already a recognized practice when the APA was enacted in 1946, she argued the statute could not logically forbid it.

The New Standard Courts Apply

Federal courts now bring their own independent judgment to any challenge to an agency’s reading of a statute. Judges cannot accept an interpretation simply because the law is unclear. They work through the text, context, history, and structure of the statute and determine its best meaning themselves.¹

Agencies are not shut out. The ruling revives an older and weaker standard from the 1944 decision Skidmore v. Swift & Co., under which an agency’s interpretation can carry “persuasive” weight based on the thoroughness of its reasoning, its consistency over time, and its fit with the statute’s language.⁵ Persuasion is not deference. An agency has to earn a judge’s agreement through the quality of its reasoning, not receive it automatically.

Deference still applies in one important pocket. When Congress explicitly tells an agency to define a term or set a standard, courts respect that delegation. A statute that instructs an agency to set “appropriate” or “reasonable” limits, for instance, hands discretion to the agency, and judges will uphold the agency’s exercise of that discretion as long as it stays within the statutory boundaries.¹ The line runs between saying what a statute means, which is now the court’s job, and choosing among policy options Congress has authorized, which remains the agency’s.

What the Ruling Does Not Disturb

The decision does not throw every existing federal regulation into doubt. The majority said explicitly that overruling Chevron “does not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework” and that courts must weigh “the reliance interests of those who have acted on those decisions.”¹ A regulation that a court upheld under Chevron in 2015 does not automatically become vulnerable because the underlying framework has changed.

Deference to agencies on factual and policy judgments also remains in place. The APA’s “arbitrary and capricious” standard under 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A) is untouched.³ When an agency does thorough analysis and makes a reasonable policy choice within its statutory authority, courts will still uphold it. Loper Bright changed who says what the law means; it did not change who makes policy inside the space Congress carved out.

The Major Questions Doctrine, which requires Congress to speak clearly before an agency can claim authority over matters of vast economic or political significance, continues to operate independently. Lower courts have confirmed that Loper Bright neither created nor altered it.

Where the Effects Are Showing Up

The ruling is already moving through pending litigation. Agencies that stretched vague statutory language now have a harder time defending those readings in court.

Health care regulations: several district courts have stayed parts of the Affordable Care Act’s nondiscrimination rule, and challenges to mental health parity regulations and prescription drug benefit rules are gaining traction.
Retirement and investment rules: the Department of Labor’s 2022 rule allowing retirement plan fiduciaries to consider environmental, social, and governance factors was originally upheld under Chevron deference, and after Loper Bright the Fifth Circuit sent it back to the trial court for reconsideration under the new standard.
Financial regulation: agencies such as the SEC, FTC, and CFPB that have pursued aggressive enforcement based on broad readings of their founding statutes face heightened litigation risk, with the FTC’s expansion of its “unfair methods of competition” authority particularly exposed.

Aggressive interpretations that might have cleared Chevron’s “reasonable” bar now have to survive a judge’s independent read of the statute. Agencies still have real power. They need to tie the requirements they impose to specific statutory language, and when that language runs out, their authority does too.

The Fishing Case Behind the Ruling

The dispute started with a 2020 rule from the National Marine Fisheries Service that required Atlantic herring vessels to pay for the federal observers who monitor their catch. The agency estimated the cost at up to $710 per day, which could cut a vessel owner’s annual returns by as much as 20 percent.⁶ Two companies, Loper Bright Enterprises and Relentless, Inc., sued the Department of Commerce, arguing that the Magnuson-Stevens Act lets the government put observers on boats but does not force the fishing industry to pay for them. The Act specifically authorizes industry-funded monitoring for North Pacific fisheries, and the fishermen argued that targeted authorization meant Congress had chosen not to extend the arrangement to Atlantic herring.⁷

The Supreme Court sent the case back to the D.C. Circuit for further proceedings. NOAA Fisheries has since directed the New England Fishery Management Council to revise and potentially withdraw the industry-funded monitoring requirements for Atlantic herring, and said the Secretary of Commerce could step in to rescind the measures directly if the council does not act.⁸ A fight over who pays for fish monitors ended up reshaping the relationship between every federal agency and the courts that review its work.

1
Supreme Court of the United States. Loper Bright Enterprises et al. v. Raimondo, Secretary of Commerce, et al.
2
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC, 467 U.S. 837 (1984)
3
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 5 USC 706 – Scope of Review
4
Constitution Annotated. U.S. Constitution – Article III
5
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Skidmore v. Swift and Co., 323 U.S. 134 (1944)
6
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. ___ (2024)
7
govinfo. Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act
8
NOAA Fisheries. Atlantic Herring: Industry-Funded Monitoring