Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, No. 22-451 (slip op., June 28, 2024) — Syllabus, chunk 3

7 Cite as: 603 U. S. ____ (2024)
Syllabus
By forcing courts to instead preten d that ambiguities are necessarily
delegations, Chevron prevents judges from judging. Pp. 23–26.
(4) Because Chevron’s justifying presumpt ion is, as Members of
the Court have often recognized, a fiction, the Court has spent the better part of four decades imposing one limitation on Chevron after another. Confronted with the byzant ine set of preconditions and exceptions that has resulted, some courts have simply bypassed Chevron or
failed to heed its various steps and nuances. The Court, for its part,
has not deferred to an agency interpretation under Chevron since
2016. But because Chevron remains on the books, litigants must continue to wrestle with it, and lower courts—bound by even the Court’s
crumbling precedents—understandably continue to apply it. At best,
Chevron has been a distraction from th e question that matters: Does
the statute authorize the challenged agency action? And at worst, it
has required courts to violate the APA by yielding to an agency the
express responsibility, vested in “the reviewing court,” to “decide all
relevant questions of law” and “inter pret . . . statutory provisions.”
§706 (emphasis added). Pp. 26–29.
(d) Stare decisis, the doctrine governing judicial adherence to precedent, does not require the Court to persist in the Chevron project. The
stare decisis considerations most relevant here—“the quality of [the
precedent’s] reasoning, the workability of the rule it established, . . .
and reliance on the decision,” Knick v. Township of Scott, 588 U. S.
180, 203 (quoting Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees ,
585 U. S. 878, 917)—all weigh in favor of letting Chevron go.
Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided. It reshaped judicial review of agency action wi thout grappling with the APA, the
statute that lays out how such review works. And its flaws were apparent from the start, prompting th e Court to revise its foundations
and continually limit its application.
Experience has also shown that Chevron is unworkable. The defining feature of its framework is the identification of statutory ambiguity, but the concept of ambiguity has always evaded meaningful definition. Such an impressionistic and malleable concept “cannot stand
as an every-day test for allocati ng” interpretive authority between
courts and agencies. Swift & Co. v. Wickham, 382 U. S. 111, 125. The
Court has also been forced to clarify the doctrine again and again, only
adding to Chevron ’s unworkability, and the doctrine continues to
spawn difficult threshold questions that promise to further complicate
the inquiry should Chevron be retained. And its continuing import is
far from clear, as courts have ofte n declined to engage with the doc -
trine, saying it makes no difference.
Nor has Chevron fostered meaningful relia nce. Given the Court’s
constant tinkering with and eventual turn away from Chevron, it is

8 LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES v. RAIMONDO
Syllabus
hard to see how anyone could reasonably expect a court to rely on Chevron in any particular case or expect it to produce readily foreseeable
outcomes. And rather than sa feguarding reliance interests, Chevron
affirmatively destroys them by allowing agencies to change course
even when Congress has given them no power to do so.
The only way to “ensure that the law will not merely change erratically, but will develop in a principled and intelligible fashion,” Vasquez
v. Hillery, 474 U. S. 254, 265, is for the Court to leave Chevron behind.
By overruling Chevron, though, the Court does not call into question
prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. The holdings of
those cases that specific agency actions are lawful—including the
Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself—are still subject to statutory
stare decisis despite the Court’s change in interpretive methodology.
See CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries, 553 U. S. 442, 457. Mere reliance
on Chevron cannot constitute a “ ‘special justification’ ” for overruling
such a holding. Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., 573 U. S.
258, 266 (quoting Dickerson v. United States, 530 U. S. 428, 443). Pp.
29–35.
No. 22–451, 45 F. 4th 359 & No. 22–121 9, 62 F. 4th 621, vacated and
remanded.
ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinio n of the Court, in which T HOMAS,
ALITO, GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH, and BARRETT, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., and
GORSUCH, J., filed concurring opinions. K AGAN, J., filed a dissenting
opinion, in which SOTOMAYOR, J., joined, and in which JACKSON, J., joined
as it applies to No. 22–1219. JACKSON, J., took no part in the consideration or decision of the case in No. 22–451.

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1 Cite as: 603 U. S. ____ (2024)
Opinion of the Court
NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the
United States Reports. Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of
Decisions, Supreme Court of the Unit ed States, Washingt on, D. C. 20543,
[email protected], of any typographical or other formal errors.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Nos. 22–451 and 22–1219
LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES, ET AL.,
PETITIONERS
22–451 v.
GINA RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF
COMMERCE, ET AL.
ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF
APPEALS FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT
RELENTLESS, INC., ET AL., PETITIONERS
22–1219 v.
DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, ET AL.
ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF
APPEALS FOR THE FIRST CIRCUIT
[June 28, 2024]