Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Administrative Law Blogs -> Within the Scope

Administrative Law

: Within the Scope

Chevron Reformulated

By E.L. Lipman

The most recent issue of the Administrative Law Review (which is a quarterly project of American University?s Washington College of Law and the American Bar Association's Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice) examines the changes and continued viability of the U.S. Supreme Court?s decision in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.

As regular readers of these pages will know, in Chevron the High Court addressed the circumstances in which courts should defer to the statutory interpretations of executive branch agencies and those in which courts should construe those terms independently of the agency?s reading. In that case, Justice John Paul Stevens famously summarized: ?When a challenge to an agency construction of a statutory provision, fairly conceptualized, really centers on the wisdom of the agency's policy, rather than whether it is a reasonable choice within a gap left open by Congress, the challenge must fail. In such a case, federal judges ? who have no constituency ? have a duty to respect legitimate policy choices made by those who do.?

Three scholars ? Elizabeth V. Foote of Boston College Law School, Linda Jellum of Mercer University?s George School of Law and (our state?s own) Daniel J. Gifford of the University of Minnesota Law School ? examine the advent of the Chevron doctrine in 1984 and how it has changed and been recast by the federal courts over the past two and half decades.

The Foote and Jellum articles were earlier posted to the Social Science Research Network and are accessible here and here. I used the remarkably helpful ?Ask a Librarian? service at the Minnesota State Law Library in order to get a look at the Professor Gifford?s piece.

All three articles in this series are worth reading ? however you come by them?.

Full post as published by Within the Scope on January 05, 2008 (boomark / email).