The U.S. Supreme Court issued a major ruling at the end of its term overturning a “misguided” and “unworkable” legal precedent that had required extensive deference to federal agency officials on unclear matters of law. The effects of this reversal are likely to be significant in many court challenges to come, including religious liberty cases. 

At issue was a court doctrine derived from the high court’s 1984 ruling in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council that required judges to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. While critics of an expanding administrative state have targeted the Chevron deference for years, this particular plea to clarify the extent of the doctrine came in two cases challenging a National Marine Fisheries Service rule that required the herring industry to bear the costs of observers on fishing boats. Lower courts had upheld the agency’s position per Chevron, so the high court decided it was time to address the problematic precedent. 

In a 6-3 ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts explained the unsoundness of Chevron’s demands beginning all the way back with the landmark 1803 Marbury v. Madison ruling that cemented the role of judicial review in the America’s system of checks and balances. Tracing the judicial branch’s responsibility to interpret the law from there forward, Roberts noted that “views of the Executive Branch could inform the judgment of the Judiciary, but did not supersede it.” 

“Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do,” wrote Roberts. “The Framers, as noted, anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment.” 

Justice Elena Kagan led the court’s liberal wing in decrying the “judicial hubris” of the ruling that, she argued, “puts courts at the apex of the administrative process as to every conceivable subject—because there are always gaps and ambiguities in regulatory statutes, and often of great import.” However, Roberts pushed back that the dissenting justices were incorrectly equating respect for Executive Branch interpretations with the binding deference he saw under Chevron. Indeed, Roberts suggested that courts yielding their interpretive role to political actors like regulators was “especially mistaken.”  

“The Framers crafted the Constitution to ensure that federal judges could exercise judgment free from the influence of the political branches,” he wrote. “They were to construe the law with “[c]lear heads . . . and honest hearts,” not with an eye to policy preferences that had not made it into the statute.” 

The court’s overturn of Chevron is likely to be significant for regulatory proceedings across the federal government, including situations in which religious liberty challenges arise. For example, recounting the long battle of the Little Sisters of the Poor against a regulator-imposed contraceptive mandate, Becket Fund for Religious Liberty attorneys wrote in an amicus brief, “The common thread over more than a decade of regulation and litigation is that federal regulators, motivated by politics and ideology, disfavored unpopular religious groups at every turn.” 

“Eliminating undue deference will… reduce future church-state conflicts, since most recent religious liberty conflicts have originated not with Congress but with regulators,” they declared. 

ECFA will carefully monitor how the overturn of the Chevron doctrine affects cases of religious freedom, tax issues, and more in the years ahead.