Punching In: High Court Signals Coming Curbs on Agency Deference

Monday morning musings for workplace watchers.

Regulating Agency|Pension Bailout Fallout

Rebecca Rainey: Recent rulings from the US Supreme Court reining in executive agencies’ regulatory authority signal that the high court’s conservative majority could take aim at the legal framework used to determine judicial review, known as the Chevron doctrine next, attorneys say.

Agency decision-making usually gets greater weight when being reviewed by the courts under the Chevron legal doctrine, which says courts should defer to a federal agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous law. But in “extraordinary cases” of “deep economic and political significance” the courts first apply a ...