Chevron deference
The former doctrine requiring courts to defer to an agency's reasonable reading of an ambiguous statute, overruled in 2024.
For forty years, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council governed judicial review of agency statutory interpretation. A court asked first whether Congress had spoken clearly; if the statute was ambiguous, it asked only whether the agency's reading was reasonable, and upheld it if so. In practice this meant agencies usually won interpretive disputes.
The Supreme Court overruled Chevron in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo in 2024, holding that courts must exercise independent judgement in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority. Agency interpretations may still be persuasive, particularly where they rest on genuine expertise or long and consistent practice, but they no longer command deference simply for being reasonable.
The term remains essential to reading current coverage because the change is still working through the courts. Its practical effect is that statutory authority is now contested far more often, which raises the stakes of the reasoning an agency records in a final rule and increases the frequency of vacatur. It sits alongside the major questions doctrine as a limit on agency power.
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