The Supreme Court has recently signaled its interest in developing a new nondelegation test, one that would have courts more aggressively police Congress’s delegations of power to agencies. This could represent a death knell for significant climate action. The technical and scientific complexity of climate change mean that it is a problem uniquely suited to redress by expert agencies. If Congress is not permitted to delegate authority to agencies to address climate change, then it will be difficult for meaningful action against climate change to be taken at the federal level. With this threat in mind, this Article evaluates the emerging basis for the Court’s new nondelegation test: Chevron. The Court has hinted that it will look to two rules developed under Chevron to guide its revived nondelegation doctrine: the major questions doctrine and the jurisdictional exception that Chief Justice Roberts laid out in City of Arlington. By grounding the long-extinct nondelegation doctrine in the robust body of Chevron jurisprudence, the Court could give the nondelegation doctrine a legitimacy and specificity that a freeform version would lack. This Article argues, however, that transplanting the rules of Chevron to the nondelegation context would be doctrinally and logically incoherent. The Article first explains how the Court’s Chevron jurisprudence is based on a particular legal fiction about congressional delegation of authority to agencies. The Court has used this legal fiction to derive limiting principles for the application of Chevron deference, such as the major question doctrine and the City of Arlington jurisdictional exception. Importantly, Chevron’s limiting principles and the legal fiction underlying them are based on a principle of legislative supremacy, i.e., the understanding that Congress is supreme in the realm of policymaking, and thus courts’ role in interpreting statutes is to be agents of Congress. By contrast, the nondelegation doctrine as it is envisioned by the current Court relies on a notion of judicial supremacy: It imagines that courts have the final say as to what is acceptable policymaking, regardless of Congress’s intentions. Transferring Chevron to the nondelegation context would therefore amount to a categorical error. As a result, the Article concludes that, given the incompatible institutional framework underlying Chevron’s rules, the Court must look elsewhere for inspiration and support for its new nondelegation test.
For the over half-million people currently homeless in the United States, the U.S. Constitution has historically provided little help: it is strongly...
It has been a big moment for court reform. President Biden has proposed a slate of important if vaguely defined reforms, including a new ethics regime...
After a term in which the conservative Roberts court swept aside the Chevron doctrine, a decision that will clip federal agencies’ authority to enact...
At points in American history, there have been significant, even massive shifts in constitutional understandings, doctrines, and practices. Apparently...
On June 27, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a case brought by the federal government regarding whether Idaho’s abortion ban conflicts with a...
Celebrating Charles Ogletree, Jr. comes naturally to so many people because he served not only as a tireless champion of equality and justice, but...
State public utility commissions are at the forefront of the clean-energy transition. These state agencies, which have jurisdiction over energy...
In recent years, several popularly elected leaders have moved to consolidate their power by eroding checks and balances. Courts are commonly the...
Does the U.S. Constitution protect the affirmative right to vote? Those focusing on the Constitution’s text say no. Yet, the Supreme Court has treated...
We apply a dynamic influence model to the opinions of the U.S. federal courts to examine the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in influencing the...
In their article, The “Free White Person” Clause of the Naturalization Act of 1790 as Super-Statute, Gabriel J. Chin and Paul Finkelman make a...
The Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law filed this amicus brief on behalf of San Bernardino...
The recently enacted Respect for Marriage Act is important bipartisan legislation that will protect same-sex marriage if the Supreme Court overrules...
Who has the legal right to challenge decisions by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration? And should the moral umbrage of a group of anti-abortion...
President Joe Biden promised during his State of the Union address on March 7, 2024, that he would make the right to get an abortion a federal law.
“If...
An upcoming Supreme Court case on Article III standing and disability presents critical questions about the future of litigation that promotes...
Professor Elizabeth Scott, the chief reporter of the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Restatement of Children and the Law, has often observed that the...
The Administrative Procedure Act’s standard-of-review provision instructs reviewing courts to “decide all relevant questions of law, interpret...