[thfuran]

>Courts have expert witnesses and a whole system around how they are called, challenged and questioned.

Yes, but this is a system where everyone involved is trying to (help their team) win rather than trying to produce generally efficacious policy.

[SllX]

Well they’re not trying to produce any policy. A District court is trying to resolve a case brought before them.

[thfuran]

Yes, that's my point. An agency interpreting the law that governs their mandate is at least nominally trying to do so in a manner that yields effective policy, but that's not really a goal of the courts, so letting the courts defer to the agencies probably will produce better policy then leaving it up to case law.

[mike_hearn]

> An agency interpreting the law that governs their mandate is at least nominally trying to do so in a manner that yields effective policy

Ideally. In practice ambiguities in statutes governing agency mandates are always interpreted by agencies in whatever way would maximize their own options and power. That's the written justification for the APA in the first place: reeling in excessive "zeal" amongst administrators.

The courts don't get powers from the law directly (except meta-powers like the one this case is about), so there's no direct benefit to judges from interpreting law in a maximally agency-advantageous way. That's why countries (not just the US) have courts resolve ambiguous law. It's a core part of their job.

[SllX]

Yeah, but giving too much deference to agencies is also a recipe for peoples' rights to be trampled by a regulatory agency acting unlawfully. Acting in accordance with their policy goals is fine and all, but they still have to do so within the bounds of the law and if they're losing at the District level because they can't rely on Chevron deference anymore, I mean, that's completely fine. Go back to Congress.

Despite its reputation for not passing any laws, the last session of Congress still passed a fair number of laws: https://legiscan.com/US/legislation/2021?status=passed

(The current one seems to be a fair bit behind, but it is also operating on razor thin vote margins and the session is not over yet).

[bumby]

How does this ruling fix that issue when the court admits it’s impossible to avoid ambiguous laws? Now it’s just unelected justices deciding instead of unelected agency bureaucrats. I think there’s an argument that could be worse, given the lifetime appointments of the court; at least the people have the chance to course correct the executive branch every four years.

I think we can all agree that the best solution is unambiguous laws, but that’s an impossibility by the courts own admission. Chevron already had a mechanism to prevent agency overreach by giving the court discretion to determine the reasonableness of an agency interpretation. This now just puts the onus on the court to do it all, and they admit they don’t have domain expertise. I fail to see how that is a better solution.

[SllX]

The great thing about an adversarial court system is when the challenge before the court is that a private party is challenging the agency’s interpretation of the law, they have to make their own case about it and convince a Judge that they’re right and the text of the law is available for all to read. Given that agencies are charged with enforcing the law, they should know the laws they are enforcing and their own authorizing statues better than anyone, and if that’s the case, they are still arguing from a position of strength. What’s changed here is that a Court is not obliged to defer to the agency’s interpretation in most cases.

I don’t want the domain experts to have an easy time of it. The law is not their convenience, it is for the peace and prosperity of the Republic, and given that Agency interpretations can change on a dime (up until recently) with almost minimal justification from a new administration, I don’t want to defer to staff who are charged with interpreting laws in a way more favorably for their new bosses, even if it goes against how they did business under their old ones to have an easier time making their case in court. The law should be more concrete than some mere electoral promises and wishful policy-thinking.