Circuits Reckon With Appeals ‘Caught in the Middle’ Post-Chevron

The Fifth Circuit’s decision to send a US Labor Department rule challenge back to district court raises thorny questions about what appeals panels are to do with cases pending on their dockets that cited the recently axed Chevron doctrine.

The US Supreme Court’s June 28 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo did away with Chevron, under which courts had to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit opted July 18 to task a lower court with untangling the interpretive issues of a post-Loper Bright reality in a ...