Last week, Dr. Adam Orford of the UGA School of Law led a lunch conversation at the River Basin Center titled The End of Chevron Deference: Understanding the Implications of Recent Supreme Court Decisions on Environmental Protection. Here’s what you need to know:

In 1984, the Supreme Court made a critical decision on the powers of federal agencies: where statutes set by legislation are clear, agencies must follow the direct statute, and where statutes are not fully clear, agencies are allowed the freedom of “reasonable interpretations.”

This deference to agency expertise is the legal foundation of many important regulations, from managing endangered species to setting limits on pollution to protecting food safety, as it allows agency experts to set specific rules around a law’s general direction. Forty years later, that deference has been revoked, severely curtailing the powers of federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

So… what now?

On Friday, October 4, a small crowd gathered to hear Dr. Orford review the origin of Chevron deference, named for the 1984 case between Chevron and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that originally set this precedent, as well as the several following cases that impacted its overturning. 

Orford discussed each of these cases and how they interact, taking questions from an audience that included everyone from graduate students to emeritus faculty.

Main Takeaways

• Congressional flexibility and agency abilities have been significantly curtailed. Now that the DOJ has charge of interpreting any and all regulatory policy, various interpretations of a law can be presented, and agency interpretations receive no special weight in that decision. 
• Every environmental regulation– as Orford put it– “can and will be challenged.” Any regulation without clear support in the original legislation is at risk, and enforcement powers are largely diminished, since the DOJ will require jury trials for most regulatory enforcement actions, and the increased caseload means cases will take significantly longer to reach resolution.
• There has been a major shift in power to the federal courts, away from Congress and federal agencies. 

When Chevron doctrine was overturned in June of 2024, SCOTUS Justice Elena Kagan dissented in an opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, predicting that the ruling “will cause a massive shock to the legal system.” Orford and much of Friday’s audience were in agreement.

Read more on what this change may mean in this UGA Law School Q&A with Orford from December 2023, where he predicted wide-ranging impacts on the functioning of bureaucracy several months before the Loper Bright decision.