Case Study 11.2 — Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024) and Its Aftermath

For forty years, Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) was the central doctrine of American administrative law. Tens of thousands of judicial opinions cited it. Generations of administrative-law students learned the two-step. The doctrine's stability was one of the foundations of agency rulemaking — a Reagan-era SEC rule, a Clinton-era EPA rule, a Trump-era OSHA rule, a Biden-era NLRB rule, all received the same analytical treatment in court.

In June 2024, the Supreme Court overruled Chevron. The vehicle was a small case about Atlantic herring. The consequences will reshape American administrative law for the foreseeable future. This case study walks through the doctrinal change, the aftermath through 2025–26, and — as the textbook discipline requires — the strongest version of each side's argument.

The herring case

The facts of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo are almost comically modest in light of the doctrinal stakes. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), part of NOAA in the Department of Commerce, regulates Atlantic herring fishing under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (1976). The statute requires that herring vessels carry federal observers on board — government-employed monitors who collect data on catch composition, bycatch (non-target species inadvertently caught), and compliance with fishing-quota rules.

For decades, the federal government paid the cost of these observers: roughly $700 per day for an observer's services. In 2020, NMFS issued a rule requiring the herring vessels themselves to pay this cost — shifting an estimated $710 per sea-day onto the operators. For a small commercial fishing operation working 200 sea-days per year, the new requirement amounted to over $140,000 in additional annual costs, enough to push some operators to the edge of viability.

Loper Bright Enterprises, a New Jersey herring operator, sued. The legal question: did the Magnuson-Stevens Act actually authorize NMFS to require industry-paid observers, or was the cost-shifting beyond the statute's grant of authority? The statute permits NMFS to require observer programs and to require fees for certain specified services, but the herring fishery's specific industry-funded observer program was not explicitly authorized.

The lower courts upheld the rule under Chevron deference. The statute was ambiguous on whether the agency could shift observer costs onto industry; the agency's interpretation was reasonable; deference followed. The Supreme Court granted certiorari, and the case became a vehicle for revisiting Chevron itself.

What the Court did

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for a 6-3 majority (with Justice Jackson recused from a related companion case), overruled Chevron. The opinion's reasoning ran roughly as follows.

Article III and the APA together direct courts to interpret statutes. Article III vests "the judicial Power" in courts, and Marbury v. Madison (1803) established that "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." The Administrative Procedure Act, in 5 U.S.C. § 706, instructs courts to "decide all relevant questions of law" and "interpret constitutional and statutory provisions." That instruction is incompatible with a doctrine that requires courts to defer to an agency's reading whenever a statute is ambiguous.

Chevron shifted interpretive responsibility from courts to agencies. Under the Chevron two-step, once a court found the statute "ambiguous" at Step One, the court was required to defer at Step Two so long as the agency's reading was "reasonable" — even if the court would have read the statute differently. That structure converted statutory interpretation from a judicial function into an executive-branch one. The result was that the same statutory text could mean different things depending on which administration was in office, because each administration's agencies could plausibly offer "reasonable" but contrary interpretations.

Ordinary tools of statutory interpretation suffice. Courts have, for centuries, decided what statutes mean using text, structure, history, purpose, and (where relevant) longstanding agency practice as evidence of meaning. Skidmore v. Swift & Co. (1944) — which predates Chevron and survives it — provides that an agency's reasoning carries weight to the extent of its persuasive power, but courts remain the final interpreters.

Stare decisis does not require keeping Chevron. The Court applied the standard stare decisis factors and found Chevron sufficiently unworkable, sufficiently inconsistent with broader doctrine, and sufficiently disconnected from settled reliance interests to overrule. Existing rules issued under Chevron deference were not retroactively invalidated, but going forward, new statutory-interpretation questions would be decided by courts.

The dissent, written by Justice Kagan and joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, argued that Chevron embodied a sensible institutional division of labor (technical statutory questions to expert agencies, constitutional questions to courts), that the majority's revival of judicial primacy on technical statutory text would destabilize the regulatory system, and that the political-accountability argument cut the other way (agency leadership is appointed by the elected President; federal judges have life tenure).

What changed and what did not

A common misreading of Loper Bright — particularly in the cycle's first year — held that the decision had eliminated agency power. It did not. The decision's actual scope is narrower and more specific.

Questions of statutory interpretation now go to courts. When a regulation depends on the agency's reading of an ambiguous statutory term, courts will determine the best reading rather than deferring to the agency. This applies prospectively to challenges of existing regulations, and it applies fully to new regulations issued after June 2024.

Agency expertise still matters on factual findings. Whether a chemical causes cancer at low doses, whether a financial product creates systemic risk, whether a labor practice harms workers, whether an aircraft design is safe — these are factual questions on which courts continue to defer to agency expertise. The Administrative Procedure Act's "substantial evidence" standard for formal proceedings, and its "arbitrary and capricious" standard for informal rulemaking, both survived Loper Bright unchanged.

The agency's interpretive role is not eliminated. Agencies still propose interpretations, defend them in court, and prevail when their interpretations are persuasive. Skidmore deference — under which an agency interpretation receives weight to the extent of its thoroughness, consistency over time, and persuasiveness — survives. What changed is that the deference is not automatic and is no longer outcome-determinative in close cases.

Existing rules are not automatically invalid. Loper Bright did not retroactively void all Chevron-era rules. Existing regulations remain in force; they can now be challenged on different grounds going forward, and many are being so challenged.

The aftermath: the first year of litigation

By spring 2025, the post-Loper Bright litigation pattern had begun to clarify. Several broad categories of cases emerged.

Environmental rules. EPA's vehicle-emission standards, methane-control rules, and chemical-regulation actions came under renewed challenge. In several early cases, courts found that the underlying statutes (Clean Air Act, Toxic Substances Control Act) provided clearer authority than challengers claimed; in others, courts found the agency had stretched the statutory text past plausible meaning. The pattern was not uniformly anti-regulation: some environmental rules survived, some did not, and the analytical work happened at the level of the specific statutory language.

Drug and food regulation. FDA approval pathways, labeling requirements, and new authorities asserted under the 21st Century Cures Act faced challenges. The agency's track record was mixed. Where the statutes spoke clearly to the question — for example, the FDA's approval authority over biosimilars, where the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act is reasonably specific — agencies generally prevailed. Where the agency had asserted authority under generic delegations (the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act's catch-all provisions), the agency more often had to defend its reading on the text.

Labor relations. NLRB rules on joint-employer status, union-election procedures, and gig-worker classification were challenged across multiple circuits. The NLRB's interpretations had historically swung between Democratic and Republican administrations under Chevron deference; post-Loper Bright, courts began deciding the underlying statutory questions themselves, with results that were less politically variable but also less predictable in advance.

SEC and CFTC. Securities and commodities-futures regulators faced challenges to climate-disclosure rules, cryptocurrency-asset classifications, and definitions of "swap" and "security-based swap." Several major rules were vacated or remanded for further analysis. The SEC's climate-disclosure rule, finalized in March 2024, had its effective date stayed pending the Loper Bright-era challenges and was substantially scaled back in 2025.

Litigation rates rose substantially. Trade associations, public-interest litigators on the right (Pacific Legal Foundation, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Institute for Justice), and traditional industry counsel filed petitions challenging significant rules at far higher rates than under Chevron. The D.C. Circuit, the primary venue for federal regulatory review, saw a substantial increase in administrative-law caseload.

Agency rule-writing changed. Career agency staff, attentive to the new doctrinal environment, began to rely more heavily on textually anchored statutory authority and less on creative interpretations of generic delegations. Internal Office of General Counsel reviews became more cautious. The pace of significant new rules slowed across multiple agencies — though disentangling the Loper Bright effect from the Trump 2.0 administration's deregulatory directives is empirically difficult.

Federal courts are constitutionally tasked with interpreting law. Marbury established that proposition in 1803, and Article III ratifies it. Chevron was a forty-year aberration in which judges — the very officials whose constitutional duty is to decide what statutes mean — abdicated that responsibility to executive-branch agencies. The result was that the meaning of federal statutes shifted with each presidential administration, because each administration's agencies could plausibly offer different "reasonable" readings, all entitled to Chevron deference. Federal law, under Chevron, became less stable and less knowable than the rule of law requires.

Worse, Chevron effectively gave the executive branch a veto over judicial review. If an agency's reading was "reasonable" — a forgiving standard — the court was bound to accept it, regardless of what the statute most plausibly meant. This converted the relationship between the elected branches into a structural imbalance: Congress wrote ambiguous statutes (because politics) and the executive then filled the ambiguity with whatever interpretation served current political needs. The legislature's power was effectively transferred to the executive, with judicial review stripped of teeth.

Restoring judicial responsibility for statutory interpretation, on this view, restores constitutional structure. Courts decide what laws mean. Agencies enforce those laws within the meaning courts find. Congress, if dissatisfied with judicial readings, amends the statute. The political-accountability argument that Chevron defenders make — that agency leadership is appointed by the elected President — applies equally to the President's appointment of federal judges; both are constitutionally validated mechanisms of democratic legitimation, and only the judicial mechanism preserves stable law across administrations.

The progressive technocratic-erosion concern (steel-manned)

Federal courts are generalist institutions. A district judge handles drug prosecutions on Monday, immigration appeals on Tuesday, civil-rights cases on Wednesday, and technical environmental rules on Thursday. A circuit judge sees a similarly varied docket. The expectation that this generalist judiciary will reach better statutory readings on the technical content of, say, the Clean Water Act's "navigable waters" provision — or the SEC's authority over decentralized cryptocurrency tokens, or the FDA's classification of biosimilar drug products — than the agency's career staff with decades of subject-matter expertise is not credible.

The premise of Chevron was institutional realism. Modern statutes are written in environments where Congress cannot specify every technical application — partly because legislators lack the expertise, partly because the regulatory environment changes faster than statutes can be amended. Chevron recognized this: where Congress writes an ambiguous statute about a technical subject and delegates implementation to an expert agency, the agency's reasonable reading is more likely to track Congress's underlying intent than a judge's unaided reading. Overruling Chevron shifts policy authority from politically accountable agency leadership (whose heads voters can affect through presidential elections) to life-tenured judges (whose appointments depended on contingent Senate compositions decades earlier).

The result, on this view, is a judiciary newly empowered to second-guess every technical regulatory choice, with no comparable expertise to bring to the analysis. Rules that the underlying statute clearly contemplates — but did not specifically authorize in 1970, 1980, or 1990 because the technology, the market, or the science did not yet exist — will be invalidated for lacking explicit statutory grounding. The major-questions doctrine, applied alongside Loper Bright, compounds the effect: agencies face both a presumption against broad authority and an absence of automatic deference to their technical readings.

The policy consequence, critics argue, is regulation frozen at the level of statutory specification existing at the moment of enactment, with Congress too polarized to update statutes to address contemporary applications. The institutional consequence is judicial-branch policy-making — substantively political choices made by judges who are not politically accountable for them.

What this case study does not say

This is, by the chapter's design, the most important administrative-law decision of the 2020s. The textbook does not tell you whether Loper Bright was correctly decided. That requires a position on what the constitutional structure requires, what institutional realism counsels, and what trade-offs between legal stability and technocratic adaptability are worth what costs.

What the textbook does say: Loper Bright is now the law. Lawyers, agency staff, judges, and regulated parties are reorganizing their work around it. The doctrinal landscape of 2030 will be substantially different from the doctrinal landscape of 2020. Citizens who want to evaluate that change for themselves need to understand both the conservative legal-restoration argument that drove the decision and the progressive technocratic concerns that the dissent articulated.

You now have both. The judgment about which is more compelling is yours to make.