In the flurry of activity at the end of the Supreme Court’s 2023-2024 term, a 6-3 majority ruled in two cases, Loper Bright v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce, that the courts need not defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the powers delegated to them by Congress when Congress’s instructions are unclear or ambiguous.

Courts still may defer to an agency’s findings of facts, but not to an agency’s interpretation of the applicable law.

The rulings overturned the court’s long-standing Chevron doctrine.

The Supreme Court’s dissenting minority—Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson—saw Loper as an exercise in judicial hubris, seizing “the power to make complex decisions over regulatory matters away from federal agencies—and giv[ing] it to themselves.”