The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to overturn a long-standing legal rule that directs the courts to defer to federal agencies’ reasonable interpretation of their own regulations.
But it imposed new restrictions that could pare back the power of administrative agencies.
The high court left intact Auer v. Robbins, a 1997 decision written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, and Bowles v. Seminole Rock & Sand Co., decided in 1945. Conservatives had urged the court to revisit the rulings amid concerns about the power of the administrative state.
“We rule today that this form of deference should continue,” said Justice Elena Kagan, who delivered the opinion of the court. “The principle of stare decisis — in English, letting decisions stand — is an important one for stability and evenhandedness in the law. To overrule a case, we need a special justification — and Kisor fails to offer one here.”
“But even as we uphold it, we reinforce its limits. Auer deference is sometimes appropriate and sometimes not,” Kagan wrote. “Whether to apply it depends on a range of considerations that we have noted now and again, but compile and further develop today. The deference doctrine we describe is potent in its place, but cabined in its scope.”
All nine justices agreed the case should be sent back to the lower court and that court’s ruling thrown out. But Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four members of the court’s liberal wing in finding the Supreme Court’s two prior decisions should be left intact.
Justice Neil Gorsuch called the court’s decision “more a stay of execution than a pardon” and said the Auer doctrine “emerges maimed and enfeebled — in truth, zombified.”
“[R]etaining even this debilitated version of Auer threatens to force litigants and lower courts to jump through needless and perplexing new hoops and in the process deny the people the independent judicial decisions they deserve. All to what end?” Gorsuch wrote. “So that we may pretend to abide stare decisis?”
Stare decisis is the principle that the court adheres to earlier decisions.
The issue of agency deference came to the high court by way of a case involving James Kisor, a Marine veteran who served in Vietnam and sought disability benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder in 1982.
The Department of Veterans Affairs rejected his initial claim for disabilities benefits, but after he sought review of the previously denied claim more than two decades later, the VA granted him relief. The VA, however, declined to award Kisor retroactive benefits.
Kisor challenged the VA’s decision but lost in federal court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit noted in its ruling “the heart of this appeal” was his “challenge to the VA’s interpretation of the term ‘relevant.’” In applying the Auer deference, the appeals court relied on the agency’s interpretation of its own regulation and ruled against Kisor.
During oral arguments in March, the justices appeared split over whether to defer to federal agencies or allow judges to interpret ambiguous regulations.
The court’s conservative wing, which now enjoys a 5-4 majority, seemed more open to tossing out the 22-year-old decision, while the liberal justices were hesitant to do so.
The split among the Supreme Court underscored concerns from the liberal wing of the bench that the new conservative majority is eager to overturn long-standing cases, including those involving abortion.
Several of the liberal justices this term have written separately to sound the alarm about the willingness of the majority to scrap precedent. During oral arguments in March, Kagan questioned whether Auer rose to the level of being “so grievously wrong that we can’t stand to live with it anymore.”
