Judge Neil Gorsuch would find sympathetic colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court in his dislike—shared by the business community—of the deference that courts give to how agencies interpret their statutes. Even so, the Republican-led Congress is moving to put the brakes on that decades-old legal doctrine.
The death of the landmark 1984 decision Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council has been long predicted, but its legacy has endured. The Chevron decision, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, directs federal courts to accept an agency’s reasonable resolution of ambiguity in a statute.
