As a legal dilettante I have some questions: What does this decision mean for court caseload going forward? If it will increase, how much? Is there budget for that?
There seem to be a lot of posts in this thread that are misinterpreting what the judgement means. Here's what I understood from reading it:
• This case does not affect Congress' ability to delegate defined lawmaking powers to the executive. Congress can continue to delegate whatever they want.
• It will therefore not have any impact on the speed with which the US government can pass laws.
• It does not award the courts any new powers.
• What it does is go back to the pre-1984 system in which the meaning of ambiguous rules were decided by the courts.
• It does so on the basis of a specific law called the APA, in which Congress spelled out that the courts should defer to agencies on matters of fact, but does not say courts should defer to agencies on how to interpret ambiguous law. Also that law was passed specifically to limit the powers of the executive. So, their ruling seems founded in the will of Congress.
Because ambiguous rules would have to be decided on anyway, and they were already being decided in the context of a court case, this won't affect the number of cases being decided.
I think the only way to attack this ruling would be to show that there was some law that superceded or replaced the APA, or that the relevant section of the APA itself was unconstitutional. But why would it be? As the court points out, the fact that ambiguous law is interpreted by the courts is a very old and unremarkable arrangement. The Chevron decision was the radical deviation from normal practice, reversing it just puts things back to how most people already think it works.
Case load is simply the number of active cases and therefore not limited to the number of cases but also includes how long each case takes to complete.
As this requires judges to consider a wider range of options it inherently means these cases will take longer thus increasing caseload. Further, it also means bringing these cases before the court will get more expensive as individual cases take longer.
You're assuming that judges are slower to resolve ambiguities than regulators are. My experience with regulators has been that often they not only let the law be ambiguous for years despite repeated requests for them to make a decision, but are then fond of retroactively and suddenly "clarifying" things in response to shifting political/media winds. Nor do they feel any obligation to be consistent with past rulings.
Courts are at least expected to make progress on cases as they are brought, to be roughly consistent with past case law, and they aren't allowed to just refuse to make a decision for a decade and return to it when it's suddenly in the newspapers.
None of what you mention really applies to specific court cases.
A judge can either defer to the agency involved, or spend a while digging into the underlying intent etc. The second may be “Better” or “Worse”, but if nothing else the first is faster.
It takes away power from the legislative and executive branches because it now requires an onerous level of specificity to regulate something. This decision will have lasting negative consequences.
Another user has raised the other side of my question, while exaggerated, is this more accurate as to what will happen than the thrust of my original question? Do we need to increase the budget for Congressional aides?
> The Roberts Court just decided to increase Congress' workload 100000x
No, again, I don't understand where commenters are getting this idea from. The ruling does not require laws to be unambiguous. It only changes who is responsible for resolving ambiguity (changes it back). The entire system will do about as much work as it was doing before. At a stretch, you could say that maybe some funding would need to be reallocated from regulators to the courts, but one would hope that "cost of interpreting ambiguous laws" is not a meaningfully large line item in the US government budget.
Now leaving the specific judgement aside for a second, IMHO - not worth much as an outsider - Congress certainly should write more precise laws and maybe hire more aides to help them do that. All governments could do better on that front. Clear law is worth its weight in gold for creating a stable and prosperous society because when people know what they can and cannot do it's less risk to create new companies, less risk to create new products, and less time is spent in courtrooms arguing disputes caused by ambiguity. A lot of people commenting on this thread seem to fear a general breakdown if lawmakers are required to do a better job of writing law, but my personal experience of regulation (limited but not zero) has been that laws that have gone via a parliament or Congress are already higher quality than administratively issued regulations. The idea that the former are written by incompetents and the latter by experts is an intuitive one, but doesn't seem to be borne out in practice.
Also, as a general aside, I think Americans should appreciate Congress more than they do. It's popular to take a dump on them but if you compare to other governments around the world US law is fairly high quality. A big part of the success of the US economy and tech industry is related to what Congress does and doesn't do. For example the DMCA was unpopular when it passed but it laid the foundation for the dominance of Silicon Valley today. Apparently most Americans like their own Congressman/woman even whilst feeling the institution itself does a bad job, but this may just reflect the fact that America is very large and diverse, so inevitably a talking shop where people from different parts spend all day disagreeing with each other will seem dysfunctional.
I think you are missing the big picture. This ruling is setting the stage for a new regulatory regime. The lower courts see where this Supreme Court is going and they are going to overturn any regulatory ruling that has any semblance of ambiguity in the underlying law. What matters is the direction the court is going and what it is signaling with this ruling.
By the way, requirement of minimising ambiguity, and explicit limitation of delegation are not specific to the US. High courts of many other countries enforce this very standard.
What other countries do is not something I care about as far as SCOTUS goes. We don’t have parliamentary system that most other countries have and rewriting 40 years of legislation in the U.S. is lot harder to do in than in most other countries.
This ruling doesn't say courts have to overturn decisions based in ambiguous law, it says the courts have to make up their own mind about the decision. That decision may also be that they agree with the agency interpretation and choosing to uphold it.
The lower courts see where the Supreme Court is heading and they will rule accordingly. I could be wrong. In a few years I think you will see that I’m right.
>Because ambiguous rules would have to be decided on anyway
I think the implication by the OP was that they would now have to be decide by the court instead of by the executive branch agencies. Previously, those agency decisions could be brought to the court, but they didn't have to for an interpretation. That seems like a subtle but important nuance.
It won't affect caseload so much as it will affect the balance of power in settlement negotiations. Source: I used to be a lawyer who worked in a heavily regulated field.
There seem to be a lot of posts in this thread that are misinterpreting what the judgement means. Here's what I understood from reading it:
• This case does not affect Congress' ability to delegate defined lawmaking powers to the executive. Congress can continue to delegate whatever they want.
• It will therefore not have any impact on the speed with which the US government can pass laws.
• It does not award the courts any new powers.
• What it does is go back to the pre-1984 system in which the meaning of ambiguous rules were decided by the courts.
• It does so on the basis of a specific law called the APA, in which Congress spelled out that the courts should defer to agencies on matters of fact, but does not say courts should defer to agencies on how to interpret ambiguous law. Also that law was passed specifically to limit the powers of the executive. So, their ruling seems founded in the will of Congress.
Because ambiguous rules would have to be decided on anyway, and they were already being decided in the context of a court case, this won't affect the number of cases being decided.
I think the only way to attack this ruling would be to show that there was some law that superceded or replaced the APA, or that the relevant section of the APA itself was unconstitutional. But why would it be? As the court points out, the fact that ambiguous law is interpreted by the courts is a very old and unremarkable arrangement. The Chevron decision was the radical deviation from normal practice, reversing it just puts things back to how most people already think it works.