Overturned Chevron Sets up Steeper Courtroom Hurdles for EPA

The Supreme Court’s decision to kill long-standing adherence to agency interpretation will force environmental regulators to play a tougher judicial defense.

The justices June 28 stripped courts’ ability to defer to executive statutory interpretation by overruling the so-called Chevron doctrine, a key legal advantage agencies had when defending rulemaking in courts.

“In the environmental context this is pretty significant, given that many of our major environmental programs are implementing statutes which have been determined to be ambiguous in the past, so therefore afforded Chevron deference,” Ella Foley Gannon, partner at Morgan Lewis, said.

This could make regulating vast, technical issues ...