I. Introduction: A Seismic Shift in the Separation of Powers
On June 28, 2024, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a decision that fundamentally altered the landscape of American administrative law. In a 6-3 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court delivered a definitive holding: “Chevron is overruled”. This declaration dismantled a forty-year-old legal doctrine that had become a cornerstone of the modern administrative state. The
Chevron framework, established in 1984, had required federal courts to defer to reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes by the administrative agencies charged with implementing them. In its place, the Court held that the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) commands the judiciary to exercise its own “independent judgment” to determine the best meaning of federal law.
The overruling of Chevron deference is not a mere procedural adjustment but a profound recalibration of power between the judicial and executive branches of the U.S. government. The decision, grounded in a reassertion of the judiciary’s role as the ultimate arbiter of law—a principle famously articulated in Marbury v. Madison—returns primary interpretive authority to the courts. This jurisprudential shift compels a systemic re-evaluation of congressional lawmaking, the scope of agency authority, and the very structure of governance in an era defined by complex regulation. It forces a reckoning with the constitutional balance of powers and will have far-reaching implications for public administration and constitutional governance for decades to come.
This report provides a comprehensive analysis of this landmark decision and its consequences. It begins by tracing the historical arc of Chevron deference, from its origins in a specific regulatory dispute to its eventual erosion and collapse. The report then offers a granular analysis of the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions in Loper Bright, dissecting the legal arguments that defined this pivotal case. To contextualize this uniquely American doctrine, a comparative analysis of judicial deference in other common law jurisdictions is presented. Finally, the report dissects the multifaceted implications of this decision for judicial review, the administrative rulemaking process, and the constitutional separation of powers, projecting the contours of the new post-Chevron legal order.
II. The Rise and Reign of Chevron Deference (1984-2024)
A. The Pre-Chevron Landscape: Deference as Persuasion
Before 1984, the relationship between courts and administrative agencies was governed by a more flexible, case-by-case standard of review. The prevailing doctrine, established in the 1944 case Skidmore v. Swift & Co., did not mandate deference but rather accorded an agency’s interpretation a degree of respect commensurate with its power to persuade. Under this framework, the weight a court would give to an agency’s view depended on a variety of factors, including “the thoroughness evident in its consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give it power to persuade”. This was a standard of respectful consideration, not one of binding deference, allowing courts to use agency expertise as a guide while retaining final interpretive authority.
B. The Genesis of Chevron: A Doctrine Forged in Political and Regulatory Flux
The doctrine that would redefine administrative law for four decades arose from a specific dispute over the meaning of the term “stationary source” in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977. The regulatory context of the early 1980s was critical to the case’s development. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Carter administration had interpreted “source” narrowly, applying it to each individual pollution-emitting piece of equipment within a facility. In 1981, the new Reagan administration’s EPA reversed this policy, adopting a plant-wide definition known as the “bubble concept,” which treated an entire industrial facility as a single source. This change allowed companies to modify or add equipment without triggering stringent permitting requirements, provided the plant’s total emissions did not increase. This stark policy reversal, driven by a change in presidential administrations, highlighted the political nature of statutory interpretation within the executive branch and set the stage for a judicial reckoning.
In Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a unanimous but short-handed Court of six justices, in an opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens, established a new framework for judicial review. The Court’s foundational reasoning was that when a statute contains an ambiguity, this ambiguity should be understood as an implicit delegation of authority from Congress to the agency tasked with administering the law. The Court reasoned that agencies possess superior technical expertise and, as part of the executive branch, are more politically accountable than unelected federal judges. Therefore, agencies were better positioned to make the necessary policy choices inherent in resolving statutory ambiguities.
The doctrine’s creation can be seen as a pragmatic attempt to impose order on the regulatory whiplash of the era and to prevent courts from becoming entangled in partisan policy disputes. Yet, in a great paradox, by tying deference to any “reasonable” agency interpretation, the doctrine institutionalized the very problem it sought to address. It created a legal framework that explicitly permitted successive administrations to implement diametrically opposed policies based on the same ambiguous statute, with each conflicting interpretation receiving judicial deference so long as it was deemed reasonable. This ultimately legitimized and accelerated policy instability, turning statutory terms, as one critic noted, into “ping-pong balls between clashing administrations”.
C. The Two-Step Framework: A Revolution in Administrative Law
The Chevron opinion laid out a formal, two-step test that revolutionized judicial review of agency action, replacing the flexible Skidmore analysis with a more rigid rule.
- Step One: A reviewing court must first ask “whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question at issue”. To answer this, the court employs the “traditional tools of statutory construction”. If the statute’s language is clear and its intent is unambiguous, that is “the end of the matter.” Both the court and the agency are bound to follow the clear directive from Congress.
- Step Two: If, however, the court determines that the statute is “silent or ambiguous” with respect to the specific issue, it proceeds to the second step. At this stage, the court does not impose its own interpretation. Instead, it asks whether the agency’s interpretation is “based on a permissible construction of the statute”. If the agency’s interpretation is “reasonable”—a relatively low bar—the court must defer to it, even if the court would have reached a different conclusion on its own.
This framework marked a significant departure, shifting interpretive authority from the judiciary to the executive branch in cases of statutory ambiguity and justifying this shift with a new theory of implied congressional delegation.
D. The Doctrine’s Apex and Erosion
For the next several decades, Chevron became one of the most cited precedents in American law, profoundly empowering administrative agencies across a vast array of domains, including environmental protection, healthcare, finance, and telecommunications. The doctrine provided agencies with the flexibility to adapt regulations to evolving scientific knowledge, new technologies, and unforeseen societal challenges, effectively allowing them to keep pace with changing conditions in a way that a slow-moving Congress could not.
However, the doctrine was subject to persistent and growing criticism. Opponents argued that it concentrated excessive power in the executive branch, violated the constitutional separation of powers by allowing agencies to perform a judicial function, and created legal instability as regulations shifted with each election.
The Supreme Court itself began to circumscribe Chevron‘s application. In the 2001 case United States v. Mead Corp., the Court held that Chevron deference applies only to agency interpretations that carry the “force of law,” such as those produced through formal notice-and-comment rulemaking or formal adjudication. Less formal agency pronouncements, like opinion letters, would be reviewed under the less deferential
Skidmore standard.
More significantly, in recent years the Court developed and increasingly applied the “major questions doctrine.” This judicial canon holds that in “extraordinary cases” involving issues of “vast economic and political significance,” an agency cannot rely on mere ambiguity to assert its authority; it must point to clear and explicit authorization from Congress. The rise of this doctrine was not merely an exception to
Chevron but its philosophical antithesis. Where Chevron‘s core premise was that statutory ambiguity implies a delegation of power to the agency, the major questions doctrine’s premise is that, on issues of great importance, ambiguity implies a withholding of power. These two principles are fundamentally irreconcilable. The Court’s reliance on the major questions doctrine in high-profile cases, such as striking down the EPA’s Clean Power Plan in
West Virginia v. EPA, signaled a profound jurisprudential shift away from deference. This growing skepticism of agency power made the eventual overruling of
Chevron seem almost inevitable, a logical extension of the Court’s new default assumption about congressional intent. Underscoring this trend, by the time Loper Bright was decided, the Supreme Court had not actually deferred to an agency’s interpretation under the Chevron framework since 2016.
III. Deconstruction of a Landmark: The Jurisprudence of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo
A. Case Background: A Dispute Over Fishing Monitors
The legal challenge that ultimately toppled Chevron originated with a group of commercial herring fishermen. The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the primary law governing federal fisheries, authorizes the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to require fishing vessels to carry federal observers on board to monitor compliance with regulations. While the statute was explicit about industry funding for observers in a few specific fisheries, it was silent on who should bear the cost for the Atlantic herring fishery. The NMFS promulgated a rule interpreting this statutory silence as granting it the authority to require the herring fishermen to pay for the monitors themselves, a cost that could run as high as $700 per day and consume a significant portion of a vessel’s profits.
The fishing companies challenged the rule in federal court. Both the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and the First Circuit, in a related case, applied the Chevron framework. They found the Magnuson-Stevens Act to be ambiguous on the cost issue and concluded that the NMFS’s interpretation was a reasonable policy choice, thus deferring to the agency and upholding the rule. The fishermen appealed to the Supreme Court, which granted certiorari limited to the question of whether
Chevron should be overruled or at least clarified. The case was consolidated for argument with
Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, an identical challenge from the First Circuit.
B. The Majority Opinion’s Rationale (Chief Justice Roberts)
Writing for a six-justice majority, Chief Justice John Roberts dismantled Chevron on statutory, historical, and practical grounds.
The majority’s central argument was that Chevron is fundamentally incompatible with the plain text of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a statute that the original Chevron Court had notably failed to analyze. The opinion focused on Section 706 of the APA, which provides that “the 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”. The Court held that this language is an unambiguous command for courts to exercise their own independent judgment, not to subordinate their judgment to that of an agency.
The opinion framed the decision as a restoration of the judiciary’s foundational role in the constitutional order. Invoking the bedrock principle of judicial review from Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Roberts reiterated that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is”. The Court traced this principle from the nation’s founding through the pre-
Chevron era, casting Chevron as a “marked departure” from over a century of established judicial practice.
The Court then took direct aim at Chevron‘s core theoretical assumption: that statutory ambiguity constitutes an implicit delegation of interpretive power from Congress to an agency. The majority dismissed this presumption as “a fiction”. It argued that statutory ambiguity is often the unintentional result of legislative compromise, simple oversight, or the inherent limitations of language, rather than a deliberate choice to empower an agency to make law.
Addressing the principle of stare decisis (adherence to precedent), the majority concluded it did not require saving Chevron. The opinion argued that the doctrine was “fundamentally misguided” because of its direct conflict with the APA and had proven “unworkable” in practice. The Court pointed to the “impressionistic and malleable” nature of the ambiguity-clarity distinction, which led to inconsistent application by lower courts. The fact that the Supreme Court itself had stopped applying
Chevron deference was presented as evidence of its unworkability and diminished precedential weight.
Finally, the Court offered an important clarification: its holding does not prevent Congress from expressly delegating authority to an agency to define specific terms or to “fill up the details” of a statutory scheme. Where such clear and explicit delegation exists, courts must respect it and will review the resulting agency action under the more deferential “arbitrary and capricious” standard, which examines the reasonableness of the agency’s process and factual conclusions, not its legal interpretation.
The majority’s approach can be seen as a masterful piece of judicial strategy. While the primary objections to Chevron from its staunchest critics are constitutional—that it violates the separation of powers—the majority opinion grounded its holding almost entirely in the statutory text of the APA. This framing allowed the Court to achieve a constitutionally motivated result (reclaiming judicial power from the executive) while presenting the decision as a simple matter of statutory interpretation. It positioned
Chevron not as a grave constitutional error, but as a judicial misreading of a statute—a weaker form of precedent that is more easily overturned under the principles of stare decisis. This statutory grounding provides the decision with a stronger veneer of doctrinal legitimacy and judicial restraint.
C. The Concurring Opinions: A Constitutional Critique
Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch filed separate concurring opinions to make the argument that the majority opinion centered on the APA did not go far enough. They contended that Chevron was not merely inconsistent with a statute but was fundamentally unconstitutional. In their view, the doctrine violates the separation of powers by compelling the judiciary (Article III) to abdicate its core function of interpreting the law and improperly transfer that essential power to the executive branch (Article II). This, they argued, represents an unconstitutional merger of executive and judicial power in the hands of administrative agencies.
D. The Dissenting View (Justice Kagan)
Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson (in the Relentless case), authored a powerful and scathing dissent. She accused the majority of a “shocking lack of humility and self-restraint” and of orchestrating a judicial power grab that fundamentally misunderstands and disrespects the roles of Congress and the executive branch.
The dissent passionately defended Chevron‘s original rationales. It argued that agencies possess crucial scientific, technical, and subject-matter expertise that generalist judges simply lack, making them far better equipped to resolve complex statutory ambiguities in specialized fields. Furthermore, the dissent stressed that agencies are part of a politically accountable executive branch, headed by a president who is answerable to the electorate. This democratic accountability, Justice Kagan argued, makes agencies a more appropriate venue for making the policy-laden choices inherent in statutory interpretation than the unelected, life-tenured judiciary.
The dissent also contended that the majority’s approach ignores the practical realities of the modern legislative process. Congress, it argued, often legislates in broad terms and intentionally leaves gaps and ambiguities in statutes, relying on agency expertise to fill in the details and adapt the law to future, unforeseen circumstances. By overruling
Chevron, the Court forces judges to step into this gap and make policy decisions they are ill-equipped and constitutionally ill-suited to handle.
Finally, the dissent warned of dire practical consequences, predicting that the decision “will cause a massive shock to the legal system”. It argued that the ruling casts a cloud of uncertainty over thousands of settled statutory constructions that were upheld under
Chevron, inviting a flood of new litigation and creating instability across the regulatory landscape. The dissent characterized the majority’s action as part of a broader trend of “roll[ing] back agency authority, despite congressional direction to the contrary”.
The profound disagreement between the majority and the dissent reveals a fundamental philosophical divide over the very nature of “law” in the administrative context. The majority opinion proceeds from a formalist premise: that every statute, regardless of its complexity or ambiguity, has a single “best reading” that it is the judiciary’s duty to discover and enforce. For the majority, statutory interpretation is a purely legal exercise. The dissent, in contrast, operates from a more realist perspective, arguing that in complex regulatory schemes, statutory ambiguity is often a space where the “law runs out” and policymaking must begin. The dissent views the resolution of such ambiguities as an inherently political and expertise-driven task, better suited for an accountable agency than an insulated court. The end of
Chevron, therefore, represents the triumph of one judicial philosophy over another, committing the judiciary to finding a single “best” legal answer even in areas previously considered the domain of agency discretion.
IV. A Comparative Perspective on Judicial Deference
To fully grasp the significance of the Chevron doctrine and its demise, it is instructive to compare the U.S. approach to that of other major common law legal systems. These jurisdictions have navigated the balance between judicial oversight and administrative authority through different doctrinal frameworks.
- The United Kingdom: The UK employs a flexible, context-dependent standard of review. The traditional test of “Wednesbury unreasonableness” is highly deferential, asking whether a decision is “so unreasonable that no reasonable authority could have ever come to it”. Over time, this has evolved into a more “variegated standard” where the intensity of judicial scrutiny depends on the nature of the right at issue and the specific context of the decision. For matters implicating rights under the Human Rights Act, a stricter “proportionality” test is applied. The overarching concept is one of “due deference,” rooted in respect for the democratic mandate and institutional competence of the decision-maker, rather than a rigid, two-step rule like Chevron.
- Canada: Canadian administrative law has firmly embraced a principle of deference. The Supreme Court of Canada has established a framework where the vast majority of administrative decisions, including an agency’s interpretation of its own governing statute, are reviewed on a standard of “reasonableness”. This standard asks whether the decision falls within a range of possible, acceptable outcomes that are justifiable in fact and law. A stricter “correctness” standard is reserved for only a few narrow categories, such as constitutional questions or questions of general law of central importance to the legal system as a whole. This approach is explicitly justified by legislative intent, agency expertise, and the democratic legitimacy of administrative bodies to interpret law within their designated sphere.
- Australia: In stark contrast, Australian courts have “vehemently den[ied]” that they show any deference to the legal interpretations of administrative decision-makers. This staunch position is grounded in a strict interpretation of the separation of powers under the Australian Constitution, which is understood to vest the power of statutory interpretation exclusively in the judiciary. Despite this formal rejection of deference, Australian courts still review administrative decisions for “legal unreasonableness,” a standard that can, in practice, involve a close examination of the decision’s justification, leading to ongoing academic debate about the true nature and intensity of judicial review in the country.
The following table distills these complex doctrines into a clear, comparative format, situating the evolution of the American approach within this global context. It reveals that the rigid, two-step Chevron framework was an outlier, and the shift in Loper Bright brings the U.S. closer, at least in theory, to the formal non-deferential model of Australia.
Table 1: Comparative Framework of Judicial Deference to Administrative Agencies
| Feature | USA (Pre-1984) | USA (Chevron Era, 1984-2024) | USA (Post-Loper Bright) | United Kingdom | Canada | Australia |
| Core Doctrine | Skidmore Deference | Chevron Two-Step Deference | Independent Judgment (de novo review of law) | Wednesbury Unreasonableness / Proportionality | Reasonableness / Correctness Standards | Legal Unreasonableness (Formal Non-Deference) |
| Standard of Review | Weight based on persuasiveness, consistency, and expertise. | Step 1: Is statute clear? Step 2: Is agency interpretation reasonable? | Court determines the “best” interpretation of the law. | Variable intensity; decision must not be “so unreasonable that no reasonable authority could make it.” | Is the decision within a range of acceptable, justifiable outcomes? | Is the decision legally unreasonable? (Strict interpretation of statutory authority) |
| Rationale | Pragmatism; respect for agency expertise. | Implied congressional delegation of interpretive power; political accountability; expertise. | APA Section 706; Constitutional separation of powers (Marbury v. Madison). | Separation of powers; respect for democratic/executive mandate; institutional competence. | Legislative intent; democratic legitimacy; agency expertise. | Strict constitutional separation of powers; judiciary has sole authority to interpret law. |
| Level of Deference | Low to Moderate (Variable) | High (if statute is ambiguous) | None (on questions of law); potential “respect” for agency views (Skidmore-like). | High (traditionally), but variable and context-dependent. | High (for most interpretations of home statute). | None (in theory). |
| Key Case Law | Skidmore v. Swift | Chevron v. NRDC | Loper Bright v. Raimondo | Associated Provincial Picture Houses v. Wednesbury Corp. | Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick; Vavilov | Minister for Immigration and Citizenship v. Li |
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V. The Post-Chevron Landscape: Implications for Governance and Law
The demise of Chevron deference initiates a new era in American law, with profound procedural, substantive, and constitutional consequences that will reshape the functioning of the federal government.
A. Procedural Impacts on Judicial Review
The most immediate change is in the methodology of judicial review. Federal courts are now the primary and final interpreters of all federal statutes, tasked with conducting a de novo review of an agency’s legal conclusions to determine the “best reading” of the law, without affording any binding deference to the agency’s view.
While deference is dead, respect for agency expertise is not entirely eliminated. The majority opinion in Loper Bright suggests that courts may still find agency interpretations informative or persuasive, particularly on highly technical subjects or when an interpretation is longstanding and has been consistently applied over time. This signals a potential revival of a
Skidmore-like analysis, where the persuasiveness of an agency’s reasoning can influence a court’s independent judgment but can never compel it.
This new standard is expected to fuel a significant increase in litigation challenging agency regulations. Without the unifying anchor of
Chevron, different judges and appellate circuits are more likely to arrive at conflicting “best” interpretations of the same ambiguous statute. This will inevitably lead to a greater number of circuit splits, which can only be resolved by the Supreme Court, thereby increasing the Court’s role as the final arbiter of administrative law.
The impact of Loper Bright is dramatically amplified by another of the Court’s recent decisions, Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors. In that case, the Court held that the six-year statute of limitations for challenging an agency rule under the APA begins to run not when the rule is finalized, but when a plaintiff is first injured by it. The combination of these two rulings is potent:
Corner Post opens the door to legal challenges against potentially decades-old regulations, and Loper Bright ensures that those challenges will now be reviewed by courts without any deference to the long-settled agency interpretation.
B. Substantive Impacts on Public Administration
The shift in judicial review will have a chilling effect on administrative rulemaking. Agencies can no longer rely on statutory ambiguity as a source of authority for expansive or innovative regulations. They must now ground their actions in the clearest possible statutory text, knowing that any interpretation will be subject to exacting, non-deferential judicial scrutiny. This is likely to lead to narrower, more cautious, and more incremental rulemaking. It may also exacerbate the problem of “ossification,” where agencies become reluctant to update or issue new rules for fear that they will be struck down in court, leaving outdated regulations in place.
Agency enforcement actions will also face greater constraints. Regulated parties will be more empowered to challenge an agency’s interpretation of its enforcement authority in court, arguing that the court’s independent “best reading” of the statute does not support the agency’s action.
Regarding the vast body of existing law, the majority opinion explicitly stated that the decision does “not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework,” and that the holdings of those cases remain protected by statutory stare decisis. However, the dissent and many legal commentators are deeply skeptical of this assurance, predicting that this will create a “massive shock to the legal system” as litigants devise new ways to re-challenge the statutory interpretations that underlie those prior decisions, creating widespread legal uncertainty.
C. Constitutional Governance and the Separation of Powers
The Loper Bright decision fundamentally alters the dialogue between the branches of government. It places immense pressure on Congress to legislate with a much higher degree of clarity and precision. The Court has effectively told the legislative branch that it can no longer “pass the buck” to administrative agencies by writing broadly worded, ambiguous laws. To achieve its policy objectives, Congress must now undertake the difficult political work of building consensus and drafting detailed statutes that leave less room for interpretation—a formidable task in a deeply polarized political environment.
The decision represents a significant expansion of judicial power into areas previously considered the domain of executive branch policy. Federal judges, who are generalists by training, will now be required to resolve complex, technical, and politically charged questions in fields ranging from environmental science and public health to financial regulation and telecommunications. This will transform the role of the federal judiciary, turning district and appellate judges into front-line national policymakers. Consequently, the political stakes of judicial appointments will become even more consequential, as the interpretive philosophies of individual judges will have a more direct and immediate impact on the scope and power of the entire federal government.
Furthermore, the ability of a new presidential administration to quickly implement its agenda through executive action is significantly curtailed. Without Chevron, reinterpreting existing statutes to align with a new administration’s policy goals will be far more difficult. A new interpretation will have to be defended in court not merely as “reasonable,” but as the single “best reading” of the law—a much higher hurdle that limits administrative flexibility. While this may lead to greater legal stability and predictability between administrations, it also makes the administrative state less responsive to the electoral mandates that put those administrations in power.
The end of Chevron may also set the stage for the next major battle over the administrative state. The decision incentivizes Congress to be more specific when it wants an agency to have interpretive power. One way to do this is to write statutes that explicitly delegate gap-filling authority to an agency (e.g., “The Administrator shall define by regulation what constitutes a ‘hazardous substance'”). The Loper Bright majority expressly permits this practice. As a result, future legislative battles may shift from debating policy details to debating the scope of these explicit delegations. This, in turn, will shift the legal battleground. Instead of litigating over ambiguity under
Chevron, challengers will attack the constitutionality of the explicit delegation itself, arguing that it violates the nondelegation doctrine by giving away Congress’s core legislative power. This creates a pathway for the Supreme Court to revive the long-dormant nondelegation doctrine as the next major tool for constraining administrative power, a constitutional question that Loper Bright carefully avoided but implicitly raised.
VI. Conclusion: Redefining the Administrative State for the 21st Century
The Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo marks the definitive end of the Chevron era. By repudiating the doctrine of judicial deference to agency statutory interpretations, the Court has reasserted the judiciary’s constitutional role as the final authority on questions of law. This landmark ruling, rooted in the text of the Administrative Procedure Act and the foundational principle of separation of powers, dismantles a forty-year-old legal framework that was instrumental in shaping the modern American administrative state.
The post-Chevron world is one of diminished agency power and ascendant judicial authority. The new equilibrium demands greater legislative precision from Congress, imposes significant constraints on the executive branch’s capacity to regulate through interpretation, and places federal judges at the center of the nation’s most complex and contentious policy disputes. While proponents of the decision herald this shift as a necessary restoration of constitutional order, the rule of law, and democratic accountability, critics warn of an era of judicial overreach, administrative paralysis, and a critical loss of expertise in the process of governance.
The full impact of this seismic shift will unfold over many years, through the crucible of thousands of lower court decisions and the strategic responses of Congress, the President, and the agencies themselves. Navigating this new legal terrain will present profound challenges for all three branches of government. It will test the capacity of a polarized Congress to legislate effectively, the ability of agencies to protect the public interest within stricter textual bounds, and the institutional competence of the judiciary to resolve the nation’s most intricate technical and social questions. Ultimately, Loper Bright is not merely the end of a legal doctrine; it is the beginning of a fundamental and uncertain re-negotiation of the powers, responsibilities, and relationships that define the American system of government.
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