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															SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

															_________________

															Nos. 22–451 and 22–1219

															_________________

															LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES, et al.,
PETITIONERS

															22–451 v. GINA RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF COMMERCE,
et al.

															on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the district of columbia circuit

															RELENTLESS, INC., et al.,
PETITIONERS

															22–1219 v. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, et al.

															on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the first circuit

															[June 28, 2024]

															Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of
the Court.

															Since our decision in Chevron
U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense
Council, Inc. , 467 U.S.
837 (1984), we have sometimes required courts to defer to
“permissible” agency interpretations of the statutes those agencies
administer—even when a reviewing court reads the statute
differently. In these cases we consider whether that doctrine
should be overruled.

															I

															Our Chevron doctrine requires courts to
use a two-step framework to interpret statutes administered by
federal agencies. After determining that a case satisfies the
various preconditions we have set for Chevron to apply, a
reviewing court must first assess “whether Congress has directly
spoken to the precise question at issue.” Id. , at 842. If,
and only if, congressional intent is “clear,” that is the end of
the inquiry. Ibid. But if the court determines that “the
statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue”
at hand, the court must, at Chevron ’s second step, defer to
the agency’s interpretation if it “is based on a permissible
construction of the statute.” Id. , at 843. The reviewing
courts in each of the cases before us applied Chevron ’s
framework to resolve in favor of the Government challenges to the
same agency rule.

															A

															Before 1976, unregulated foreign vessels
dominated fishing in the international waters off the U. S.
coast, which began just 12 nautical miles offshore. See, e.g. , S. Rep. No. 94–459, pp. 2–3 (1975). Recognizing
the resultant overfishing and the need for sound management of
fishery resources, Congress enacted the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery
Conservation and Management Act (MSA). See 90 Stat. 331 (codified
as amended at 16 U. S. C. §1801 et seq .). The
MSA and subsequent amendments extended the jurisdiction of the
United States to 200 nautical miles beyond the U. S.
territorial sea and claimed “exclusive fishery management authority
over all fish” within that area, known as the “exclusive economic
zone.” §1811(a); see Presidential Proclamation No. 5030, 3 CFR 22
(1983 Comp.); §§101, 102, 90 Stat. 336. The National Marine
Fisheries Service (NMFS) administers the MSA under a delegation
from the Secretary of Commerce.

															The MSA established eight regional fishery
management councils composed of representatives from the coastal
States, fishery stakeholders, and NMFS. See 16 U. S. C.
§§1852(a), (b). The councils develop fishery management plans,
which NMFS approves and promulgates as final regulations. See
§§1852(h), 1854(a). In service of the statute’s fishery
conservation and management goals, see §1851(a), the MSA requires
that certain provisions—such as “a mechanism for specifying annual
catch limits . . . at a level such that overfishing does
not occur,” §1853(a)(15)—be included in these plans, see §1853(a).
The plans may also include additional discretionary provisions. See
§1853(b). For example, plans may “prohibit, limit, condition, or
require the use of specified types and quantities of fishing gear,
fishing vessels, or equipment,” §1853(b)(4); “reserve a portion of
the allowable biological catch of the fishery for use in scientific
research,” §1853(b)(11); and “prescribe such other measures,
requirements, or conditions and restrictions as are determined to
be necessary and appropriate for the conservation and management of
the fishery,” §1853(b)(14).

															Relevant here, a plan may also require that “one
or more observers be carried on board” domestic vessels “for the
purpose of collecting data necessary for the conservation and
management of the fishery.” §1853(b)(8). The MSA specifies three
groups that must cover costs associated with observers: (1) foreign
fishing vessels operating within the exclusive economic zone (which must carry observers), see §§1821(h)(1)(A), (h)(4), (h)(6);
(2) vessels participating in certain limited access privilege
programs, which impose quotas permitting fishermen to harvest only
specific quantities of a fishery’s total allowable catch, see
§§1802(26), 1853a(c)(1)(H), (e)(2), 1854(d)(2); and (3) vessels
within the jurisdiction of the North Pacific Council, where many of
the largest and most successful commercial fishing enterprises in
the Nation operate, see §1862(a). In the latter two cases, the MSA
expressly caps the relevant fees at two or three percent of the
value of fish harvested on the vessels. See §§1854(d)(2)(B),
1862(b)(2)(E). And in general, it authorizes the Secretary to
impose “sanctions” when “any payment required for observer services
provided to or contracted by an owner or operator . . .
has not been paid.” §1858(g)(1)(D).

															The MSA does not contain similar terms
addressing whether Atlantic herring fishermen may be required to
bear costs associated with any observers a plan may mandate. And at
one point, NMFS fully funded the observer coverage the New England
Fishery Management Council required in its plan for the Atlantic
herring fishery. See 79 Fed. Reg. 8792 (2014). In 2013, however,
the council proposed amending its fishery management plans to
empower it to require fishermen to pay for observers if federal
funding became unavailable. Several years later, NMFS promulgated a
rule approving the amendment. See 85 Fed. Reg. 7414 (2020).

															With respect to the Atlantic herring fishery,
the Rule created an industry funded program that aims to ensure
observer coverage on 50 percent of trips undertaken by vessels with
certain types of permits. Under that program, vessel
representatives must “declare into” a fishery before beginning a
trip by notifying NMFS of the trip and announcing the species the
vessel intends to harvest. If NMFS determines that an observer is
required, but declines to assign a Government-paid one, the vessel
must contract with and pay for a Government-certified third-party
observer. NMFS estimated that the cost of such an observer would be
up to $710 per day, reducing annual returns to the vessel owner by
up to 20 percent. See id. , at 7417–7418.

															B

															Petitioners Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc.,
H&L Axelsson, Inc., Lund Marr Trawlers LLC, and Scombrus One
LLC are family businesses that operate in the Atlantic herring
fishery. In February 2020, they challenged the Rule under the MSA,
16 U. S. C. §1855(f ), which incorporates the
Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U. S. C. §551 et seq. In relevant part, they argued that the MSA does
not authorize NMFS to mandate that they pay for observers required
by a fishery management plan. The District Court granted summary
judgment to the Government. It concluded that the MSA authorized
the Rule, but noted that even if these petitioners’ “arguments were
enough to raise an ambiguity in the statutory text,” deference to
the agency’s interpretation would be warranted under Chevron . 544 F. Supp. 3d 82, 107 (DC 2021); see id. , at 103–107.

															A divided panel of the D. C. Circuit
affirmed. See 45 F. 4th 359 (2022). The majority addressed
various provisions of the MSA and concluded that it was not “wholly
unambiguous” whether NMFS may require Atlantic herring fishermen to
pay for observers. Id. , at 366. Because there remained “some
question” as to Congress’s intent, id. , at 369, the court
proceeded to Chevron ’s second step and deferred to the
agency’s interpretation as a “reasonable” construction of the MSA,
45 F. 4th, at 370. In dissent, Judge Walker concluded that
Congress’s silence on industry funded observers for the Atlantic
herring fishery—coupled with the express provision for such
observers in other fisheries and on foreign vessels—unambiguously
indicated that NMFS lacked the authority to “require [Atlantic
herring] fishermen to pay the wages of at-sea monitors.” Id. , at 375.

															C

															Petitioners Relentless Inc., Huntress Inc.,
and Seafreeze Fleet LLC own two vessels that operate in the
Atlantic herring fishery: the F/V Relentless and the F/V Persistence .[ 1 ] These
vessels use small-mesh bottom-trawl gear and can freeze fish at
sea, so they can catch more species of fish and take longer trips
than other vessels (about 10 to 14 days, as opposed to the more
typical 2 to 4). As a result, they generally declare into multiple
fisheries per trip so they can catch whatever the ocean offers up.
If the vessels declare into the Atlantic herring fishery for a
particular trip, they must carry an observer for that trip if NMFS
selects the trip for coverage, even if they end up harvesting fewer
herring than other vessels—or no herring at all.

															This set of petitioners, like those in the
D. C. Circuit case, filed a suit challenging the Rule as
unauthorized by the MSA. The District Court, like the D. C.
Circuit, deferred to NMFS’s contrary interpretation under Chevron and thus granted summary judgment to the Government.
See 561 F. Supp. 3d 226, 234–238 (RI 2021).

															The First Circuit affirmed. See 62 F. 4th
621 (2023). It relied on a “default norm” that regulated entities
must bear compliance costs, as well as the MSA’s sanctions
provision, Section 1858(g)(1)(D). See id. , at 629–631. And
it rejected petitioners’ argument that the express statutory
authorization of three industry funding programs demonstrated that
NMFS lacked the broad implicit authority it asserted to impose such
a program for the Atlantic herring fishery. See id. , at
631–633. The court ultimately concluded that the “[a]gency’s
interpretation of its authority to require at-sea monitors who are
paid for by owners of regulated vessels does not ‘exceed[ ]
the bounds of the permissible.’ ” Id. , at 633–634
(quoting Barnhart v. Walton , 535
U.S. 212 , 218 (2002); alteration in original). In reaching that
conclusion, the First Circuit stated that it was applying Chevron ’s two-step framework. 62 F. 4th, at 628. But it
did not explain which aspects of its analysis were relevant to
which of Chevron ’s two steps. Similarly, it declined to
decide whether the result was “a product of Chevron step one
or step two.” Id. , at 634.

															We granted certiorari in both cases, limited to
the question whether Chevron should be overruled or
clarified. See 601 U. S. ___ (2023); 598 U. S. ___
(2023).[ 2 ]

															II

															A

															Article III of the Constitution assigns to the
Federal Judiciary the responsibility and power to adjudicate
“Cases” and “Controversies”—concrete disputes with consequences for
the parties involved. The Framers appreciated that the laws judges
would necessarily apply in resolving those disputes would not
always be clear. Cognizant of the limits of human language and
foresight, they anticipated that “[a]ll new laws, though penned
with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and
most mature deliberation,” would be “more or less obscure and
equivocal, until their meaning” was settled “by a series of
particular discussions and adjudications.” The Federalist
No. 37, p. 236 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) (J. Madison).

															The Framers also envisioned that the final
“interpretation of the laws” would be “the proper and peculiar
province of the courts.” Id. , No. 78, at 525 (A.
Hamilton). Unlike the political branches, the courts would by
design exercise “neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment.” Id. , at 523. To ensure the “steady, upright and impartial
administration of the laws,” the Framers structured the
Constitution to allow judges to exercise that judgment independent
of influence from the political branches. Id. , at 522; see id. , at 522–524; Stern v. Marshall , 564 U.S.
462 , 484 (2011).

															This Court embraced the Framers’ understanding
of the judicial function early on. In the foundational decision of Marbury v. Madison , Chief Justice Marshall famously
declared that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the
judicial department to say what the law is.” 1 Cranch 137, 177
(1803). And in the following decades, the Court understood
“interpret[ing] the laws, in the last resort,” to be a “solemn
duty” of the Judiciary. United States v. Dickson , 15
Pet. 141, 162 (1841) (Story, J., for the Court). When the meaning
of a statute was at issue, the judicial role was to “interpret the
act of Congress, in order to ascertain the rights of the parties.” Decatur v. Paulding , 14 Pet. 497, 515 (1840).

															The Court also recognized from the outset,
though, that exercising independent judgment often included
according due respect to Executive Branch interpretations of
federal statutes. For example, in Edwards’ Lessee v. Darby , 12 Wheat. 206 (1827), the Court explained that “[i]n
the construction of a doubtful and ambiguous law, the
contemporaneous construction of those who were called upon to act
under the law, and were appointed to carry its provisions into
effect, is entitled to very great respect.” Id. , at 210; see
also United States v. Vowell , 5 Cranch 368, 372
(1809) (Marshall, C. J., for the Court).

															Such respect was thought especially warranted
when an Executive Branch interpretation was issued roughly
contemporaneously with enactment of the statute and remained
consistent over time. See Dickson , 15 Pet., at 161; United States v. Alabama Great Southern R. Co. , 142 U.S.
615 , 621 (1892); National Lead Co. v. United
States , 252 U.S.
140 , 145–146 (1920). That is because “the longstanding
‘practice of the government’ ”—like any other interpretive
aid—“can inform [a court’s] determination of ‘what the law
is.’ ” NLRB v. Noel Canning , 573 U.S.
513 , 525 (2014) (first quoting McCulloch v. Maryland , 4 Wheat. 316, 401 (1819); then quoting Marbury , 1 Cranch, at 177). The Court also gave “the most
respectful consideration” to Executive Branch interpretations
simply because “[t]he officers concerned [were] usually able men,
and masters of the subject,” who were “[n]ot unfrequently
. . . the draftsmen of the laws they [were] afterwards
called upon to interpret.” United States v. Moore , 95 U.S.
760 , 763 (1878); see also Jacobs v. Prichard , 223 U.S.
200 , 214 (1912).

															“Respect,” though, was just that. The views of
the Executive Branch could inform the judgment of the Judiciary,
but did not supersede it. Whatever respect an Executive Branch
interpretation was due, a judge “certainly would not be bound to
adopt the construction given by the head of a department.” Decatur , 14 Pet., at 515; see also Burnet v. Chicago Portrait Co. , 285 U.S.
1 , 16 (1932). Otherwise, judicial judgment would not be
independent at all. As Justice Story put it, “in cases where [a
court’s] own judgment . . . differ[ed] from that of other
high functionaries,” the court was “not at liberty to surrender, or
to waive it.” Dickson , 15 Pet., at 162.

															B

															The New Deal ushered in a “rapid expansion of
the administrative process.” United States v. Morton Salt
Co. , 338 U.S.
632 , 644 (1950). But as new agencies with new powers
proliferated, the Court continued to adhere to the traditional
understanding that questions of law were for courts to decide,
exercising independent judgment.

															During this period, the Court often treated
agency determinations of fact as binding on the courts,
provided that there was “evidence to support the findings.” St.
Joseph Stock Yards Co. v. United States , 298 U.S.
38 , 51 (1936). “When the legislature itself acts within the
broad field of legislative discretion,” the Court reasoned, “its
determinations are conclusive.” Ibid. Congress could
therefore “appoint[ ] an agent to act within that sphere of
legislative authority” and “endow the agent with power to make findings of fact which are conclusive, provided the
requirements of due process which are specially applicable to such
an agency are met, as in according a fair hearing and acting upon
evidence and not arbitrarily.” Ibid. (emphasis added).

															But the Court did not extend similar deference
to agency resolutions of questions of law . It instead made
clear, repeatedly, that “[t]he interpretation of the meaning of
statutes, as applied to justiciable controversies,” was
“exclusively a judicial function.” United States v. American Trucking Assns., Inc. , 310
U.S. 534 , 544 (1940); see also Social Security Bd. v. Nierotko , 327 U.S.
358 , 369 (1946); Medo Photo Supply Corp. v. NLRB , 321 U.S.
678 , 681–682, n. 1 (1944). The Court understood, in the
words of Justice Brandeis, that “[t]he supremacy of law demands
that there shall be opportunity to have some court decide whether
an erroneous rule of law was applied.” St. Joseph Stock
Yards , 298 U. S., at 84 (concurring opinion). It also
continued to note, as it long had, that the informed judgment of
the Executive Branch—especially in the form of an interpretation
issued contemporaneously with the enactment of the statute—could be
entitled to “great weight.” American Trucking Assns. , 310
U. S., at 549.

															Perhaps most notably along those lines, in Skidmore v. Swift & Co. , 323
U.S. 134 (1944), the Court explained that the “interpretations
and opinions” of the relevant agency, “made in pursuance of
official duty” and “based upon . . . specialized
experience,” “constitute[d] a body of experience and informed
judgment to which courts and litigants [could] properly resort for
guidance,” even on legal questions. Id. , at 139–140. “The
weight of such a judgment in a particular case,” the Court
observed, would “depend upon the thoroughness evident in its
consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with
earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give
it power to persuade, if lacking power to control.” Id. , at
140.

															On occasion, to be sure, the Court applied
deferential review upon concluding that a particular statute
empowered an agency to decide how a broad statutory term applied to
specific facts found by the agency. For example, in Gray v. Powell , 314 U.S.
402 (1941), the Court deferred to an administrative conclusion
that a coal-burning railroad that had arrangements with several
coal mines was not a coal “producer” under the Bituminous Coal Act
of 1937. Congress had “specifically” granted the agency the
authority to make that determination. Id. , at 411. The Court
thus reasoned that “[w]here, as here, a determination has been left
to an administrative body, this delegation will be respected and
the administrative conclusion left untouched” so long as the
agency’s decision constituted “a sensible exercise of judgment.” Id. , at 412–413. Similarly, in NLRB v. Hearst
Publications, Inc. , 322 U.S.
111 (1944), the Court deferred to the determination of the
National Labor Relations Board that newsboys were “employee[s]”
within the meaning of the National Labor Relations Act. The Act
had, in the Court’s judgment, “assigned primarily” to the Board the
task of marking a “definitive limitation around the term
‘employee.’ ” Id. , at 130. The Court accordingly viewed
its own role as “limited” to assessing whether the Board’s
determination had a “ ‘warrant in the record’ and a reasonable
basis in law.” Id. , at 131.

															Such deferential review, though, was cabined to
factbound determinations like those at issue in Gray and Hearst . Neither Gray nor Hearst purported to
refashion the longstanding judicial approach to questions of law.
In Gray , after deferring to the agency’s determination that
a particular entity was not a “producer” of coal, the Court went on
to discern, based on its own reading of the text, whether another
statutory term—“other disposal” of coal—encompassed a transaction
lacking a transfer of title. See 314 U. S., at 416–417. The
Court evidently perceived no basis for deference to the agency with
respect to that pure legal question. And in Hearst , the
Court proclaimed that “[u]ndoubtedly questions of statutory
interpretation . . . are for the courts to resolve,
giving appropriate weight to the judgment of those whose special
duty is to administer the questioned statute.” 322 U. S., at
130–131. At least with respect to questions it regarded as
involving “statutory interpretation,” the Court thus did not
disturb the traditional rule. It merely thought that a different
approach should apply where application of a statutory term was
sufficiently intertwined with the agency’s factfinding.

															In any event, the Court was far from consistent
in reviewing deferentially even such factbound statutory
determinations. Often the Court simply interpreted and applied the
statute before it. See K. Davis, Administrative Law §248,
p. 893 (1951) (“The one statement that can be made with
confidence about applicability of the doctrine of Gray v. Powell is
that sometimes the Supreme Court applies it and sometimes it does
not.”); B. Schwartz, Gray vs. Powell and the Scope of Review, 54
Mich. L. Rev. 1, 68 (1955) (noting an “embarrassingly large
number of Supreme Court decisions that do not adhere to the
doctrine of Gray v. Powell ”). In one illustrative example,
the Court rejected the U. S. Price Administrator’s
determination that a particular warehouse was a “public utility”
entitled to an exemption from the Administrator’s General Maximum
Price Regulation. Despite the striking resemblance of that
administrative determination to those that triggered deference in Gray and Hearst , the Court declined to “accept the
Administrator’s view in deference to administrative construction.” Davies Warehouse Co. v. Bowles , 321 U.S.
144 , 156 (1944). The Administrator’s view, the Court explained,
had “hardly seasoned or broadened into a settled administrative
practice,” and thus did not “overweigh the considerations” the
Court had “set forth as to the proper construction of the statute.” Ibid. Nothing in the New Deal era or before it thus
resembled the deference rule the Court would begin applying decades
later to all varieties of agency interpretations of statutes.
Instead, just five years after Gray and two after Hearst , Congress codified the opposite rule: the traditional
understanding that courts must “decide all relevant
questions of law.” 5 U. S. C. §706.[ 3 ]

															C

															Congress in 1946 enacted the APA “as a check
upon administrators whose zeal might otherwise have carried them to
excesses not contemplated in legislation creating their offices.” Morton Salt , 338 U. S., at 644. It was the culmination
of a “comprehensive rethinking of the place of administrative
agencies in a regime of separate and divided powers.” Bowen v. Michigan Academy of Family Physicians , 476 U.S.
667 , 670–671 (1986).

															In addition to prescribing procedures for agency
action, the APA delineates the basic contours of judicial review of
such action. As relevant here, Section 706 directs that “[t]o the
extent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewing
court shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret
constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning
or applicability of the terms of an agency action.” 5
U. S. C. §706. It further requires courts to “hold
unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions
found to be . . . not in accordance with law.”
§706(2)(A).

															The APA thus codifies for agency cases the
unremarkable, yet elemental proposition reflected by judicial
practice dating back to Marbury : that courts decide legal
questions by applying their own judgment. It specifies that courts,
not agencies, will decide “ all relevant questions of law”
arising on review of agency action, §706 (emphasis added)—even
those involving ambiguous laws—and set aside any such action
inconsistent with the law as they interpret it. And it prescribes
no deferential standard for courts to employ in answering those
legal questions. That omission is telling, because Section 706 does mandate that judicial review of agency policymaking and
factfinding be deferential. See §706(2)(A) (agency action to be set
aside if “arbitrary, capricious, [or] an abuse of discretion”);
§706(2)(E) (agency factfinding in formal proceedings to be set
aside if “unsupported by substantial evidence”).

															In a statute designed to “serve as the
fundamental charter of the administrative state,” Kisor v. Wilkie , 588 U.S. 558, 580 (2019) (plurality opinion)
(internal quotation marks omitted), Congress surely would have
articulated a similarly deferential standard applicable to
questions of law had it intended to depart from the settled pre-APA
understanding that deciding such questions was “exclusively a
judicial function,” American Trucking Assns. , 310
U. S., at 544. But nothing in the APA hints at such a dramatic
departure. On the contrary, by directing courts to “interpret
constitutional and statutory provisions” without differentiating
between the two, Section 706 makes clear that agency
interpretations of statutes—like agency interpretations of the
Constitution—are not entitled to deference. Under the APA,
it thus “remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether
the law means what the agency says.” Perez v. Mortgage
Bankers Assn. , 575 U.S.
92 , 109 (2015) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment).[ 4 ]

															The text of the APA means what it says. And a
look at its history if anything only underscores that plain
meaning. According to both the House and Senate Reports on the
legislation, Section 706 “provide[d] that questions of law are for
courts rather than agencies to decide in the last analysis.”
H. R. Rep. No. 1980, 79th Cong., 2d Sess., 44 (1946) (emphasis
added); accord, S. Rep. No. 752, 79th Cong., 1st Sess., 28
(1945). Some of the legislation’s most prominent supporters
articulated the same view. See 92 Cong. Rec. 5654 (1946) (statement
of Rep. Walter); P. McCarran, Improving “Administrative Justice”:
Hearings and Evidence; Scope of Judicial Review, 32
A. B. A. J. 827, 831 (1946). Even the Department of
Justice—an agency with every incentive to endorse a view of the APA
favorable to the Executive Branch—opined after its enactment that
Section 706 merely “restate[d] the present law as to the scope of
judicial review.” Dept. of Justice, Attorney General’s Manual on
the Administrative Procedure Act 108 (1947); see also Kisor ,
588 U. S., at 582 (plurality opinion) (same). That “present
law,” as we have described, adhered to the traditional conception
of the judicial function. See supra , at 9–13.

															Various respected commentators contemporaneously
maintained that the APA required reviewing courts to exercise
independent judgment on questions of law. Professor John Dickinson,
for example, read the APA to “impose a clear mandate that all
[questions of law] shall be decided by the reviewing Court itself,
and in the exercise of its own independent judgment.”
Administrative Procedure Act: Scope and Grounds of Broadened
Judicial Review, 33 A. B. A. J. 434, 516 (1947).
Professor Bernard Schwartz noted that §706 “would seem
. . . to be merely a legislative restatement of the
familiar review principle that questions of law are for the
reviewing court, at the same time leaving to the courts the task of
determining in each case what are questions of law.” Mixed
Questions of Law and Fact and the Administrative Procedure Act, 19
Ford. L. Rev. 73, 84–85 (1950). And Professor Louis Jaffe, who
had served in several agencies at the advent of the New Deal,
thought that §706 leaves it up to the reviewing “court” to “decide
as a ‘question of law’ whether there is ‘discretion’ in the
premises”—that is, whether the statute at issue delegates
particular discretionary authority to an agency. Judicial Control
of Administrative Action 570 (1965).

															The APA, in short, incorporates the traditional
understanding of the judicial function, under which courts must
exercise independent judgment in determining the meaning of
statutory provisions. In exercising such judgment, though, courts
may—as they have from the start—seek aid from the interpretations
of those responsible for implementing particular statutes. Such
interpretations “constitute a body of experience and informed
judgment to which courts and litigants may properly resort for
guidance” consistent with the APA. Skidmore , 323 U. S.,
at 140. And interpretations issued contemporaneously with the
statute at issue, and which have remained consistent over time, may
be especially useful in determining the statute’s meaning. See ibid. ; American Trucking Assns. , 310
U. S., at 549.

															In a case involving an agency, of course, the
statute’s meaning may well be that the agency is authorized to
exercise a degree of discretion. Congress has often enacted such
statutes. For example, some statutes “expressly delegate[ ]”
to an agency the authority to give meaning to a particular
statutory term. Batterton v. Francis , 432 U.S.
416 , 425 (1977) (emphasis deleted).[ 5 ] Others empower an agency to prescribe rules to “fill up
the details” of a statutory scheme, Wayman v. Southard , 10 Wheat. 1, 43 (1825), or to regulate subject to
the limits imposed by a term or phrase that “leaves agencies with
flexibility,” Michigan v. EPA , 576 U.S.
743 , 752 (2015), such as “appropriate” or
“reasonable.”[ 6 ]

															When the best reading of a statute is that it
delegates discretionary authority to an agency, the role of the
reviewing court under the APA is, as always, to independently
interpret the statute and effectuate the will of Congress subject
to constitutional limits. The court fulfills that role by
recognizing constitutional delegations, “fix[ing] the boundaries of
[the] delegated authority,” H. Monaghan, Marbury and the
Administrative State, 83 Colum. L. Rev. 1, 27 (1983), and
ensuring the agency has engaged in “ ‘reasoned
decisionmaking’ ” within those boundaries, Michigan ,
576 U. S., at 750 (quoting Allentown Mack Sales &
Service, Inc. v. NLRB , 522 U.S.
359 , 374 (1998)); see also Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Assn. of
United States, Inc. v. State Farm Mut. Automobile Ins.
Co. , 463 U.S.
29 (1983). By doing so, a court upholds the traditional
conception of the judicial function that the APA adopts.

															III

															The deference that Chevron requires of
courts reviewing agency action cannot be squared with the APA.

															A

															In the decades between the enactment of the
APA and this Court’s decision in Chevron , courts generally
continued to review agency interpretations of the statutes they
administer by independently examining each statute to determine its
meaning. Cf. T. Merrill, Judicial Deference to Executive Precedent,
101 Yale L. J. 969, 972–975 (1992). As an early proponent (and
later critic) of Chevron recounted, courts during this
period thus identified delegations of discretionary authority to
agencies on a “statute-by-statute basis.” A. Scalia, Judicial
Deference to Administrative Interpretations of Law, 1989 Duke
L. J. 511, 516. Chevron , decided in 1984 by a bare quorum
of six Justices, triggered a marked departure from the traditional
approach. The question in the case was whether an EPA regulation
“allow[ing] States to treat all of the pollution-emitting devices
within the same industrial grouping as though they were encased
within a single ‘bubble’ ” was consistent with the term
“stationary source” as used in the Clean Air Act. 467 U. S.,
at 840. To answer that question of statutory interpretation, the
Court articulated and employed a now familiar two-step approach
broadly applicable to review of agency action.

															The first step was to discern “whether Congress
ha[d] directly spoken to the precise question at issue.” Id. , at 842. The Court explained that “[i]f the intent of
Congress is clear, that is the end of the matter,” ibid. ,
and courts were therefore to “reject administrative constructions
which are contrary to clear congressional intent,” id. , at
843, n. 9. To discern such intent, the Court noted, a
reviewing court was to “employ[ ] traditional tools of
statutory construction.” Ibid. Without mentioning the APA, or acknowledging any
doctrinal shift, the Court articulated a second step applicable
when “Congress ha[d] not directly addressed the precise question at
issue.” Id. , at 843. In such a case—that is, a case in which
“the statute [was] silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific
issue” at hand — a reviewing court could not “simply impose
its own construction on the statute, as would be necessary in the
absence of an administrative interpretation.” Ibid. (footnote omitted). A court instead had to set aside the
traditional interpretive tools and defer to the agency if it had
offered “a permissible construction of the statute,” ibid. ,
even if not “the reading the court would have reached if the
question initially had arisen in a judicial proceeding,” ibid. , n. 11. That directive was justified, according
to the Court, by the understanding that administering statutes
“requires the formulation of policy” to fill statutory “gap[s]”; by
the long judicial tradition of according “considerable weight” to
Executive Branch interpretations; and by a host of other
considerations, including the complexity of the regulatory scheme,
EPA’s “detailed and reasoned” consideration, the policy-laden
nature of the judgment supposedly required, and the agency’s
indirect accountability to the people through the President. Id. , at 843, 844, and n. 14, 865.

															Employing this new test, the Court concluded
that Congress had not addressed the question at issue with the
necessary “level of specificity” and that EPA’s interpretation was
“entitled to deference.” Id. , at 865. It did not matter why Congress, as the Court saw it, had not squarely
addressed the question, see ibid. , or that “the agency ha[d]
from time to time changed its interpretation,” id. , at 863.
The latest EPA interpretation was a permissible reading of the
Clean Air Act, so under the Court’s new rule, that reading
controlled.

															Initially, Chevron “seemed destined to
obscurity.” T. Merrill, The Story of Chevron : The Making of
an Accidental Landmark, 66 Admin. L. Rev. 253, 276 (2014). The
Court did not at first treat it as the watershed decision it was
fated to become; it was hardly cited in cases involving statutory
questions of agency authority. See ibid. But within a few
years, both this Court and the courts of appeals were routinely
invoking its two-step framework as the governing standard in such
cases. See id. , at 276–277. As the Court did so, it
revisited the doctrine’s justifications. Eventually, the Court
decided that Chevron rested on “a presumption that Congress,
when it left ambiguity in a statute meant for implementation by an
agency, understood that the ambiguity would be resolved, first and
foremost, by the agency, and desired the agency (rather than the
courts) to possess whatever degree of discretion the ambiguity
allows.” Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota),
N. A. , 517 U.S.
735 , 740–741 (1996); see also, e.g. , Cuozzo Speed
Technologies, LLC v. Lee , 579 U.S. 261, 276–277 (2016); Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA , 573 U.S.
302 , 315 (2014); National Cable & Telecommunications
Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services , 545 U.S.
967 , 982 (2005).

															B

															Neither Chevron nor any subsequent
decision of this Court attempted to reconcile its framework with
the APA. The “law of deference” that this Court has built on the
foundation laid in Chevron has instead been “[h]eedless of
the original design” of the APA. Perez , 575 U. S., at
109 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment).

															1 Chevron defies the command of the APA
that “the reviewing court”—not the agency whose action it
reviews—is to “decide all relevant questions of law” and
“interpret . . . statutory provisions.” §706 (emphasis
added). It requires a court to ignore , not follow, “the
reading the court would have reached” had it exercised its
independent judgment as required by the APA. Chevron , 467
U. S., at 843, n. 11. And although exercising independent
judgment is consistent with the “respect” historically given to
Executive Branch interpretations, see, e.g. , Edwards’
Lessee , 12 Wheat., at 210; Skidmore , 323 U. S., at
140, Chevron insists on much more. It demands that courts
mechanically afford binding deference to agency
interpretations, including those that have been inconsistent over
time. See 467 U. S., at 863. Still worse, it forces courts to
do so even when a pre-existing judicial precedent holds that the
statute means something else—unless the prior court happened to
also say that the statute is “unambiguous.” Brand X , 545
U. S., at 982. That regime is the antithesis of the time
honored approach the APA prescribes. In fretting over the prospect
of “allow[ing]” a judicial interpretation of a statute “to override
an agency’s” in a dispute before a court, ibid. , Chevron turns the statutory scheme for judicial review of
agency action upside down. Chevron cannot be reconciled with the
APA, as the Government and the dissent contend, by presuming that
statutory ambiguities are implicit delegations to agencies. See
Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219, pp. 13, 37–38; post , at 4–15 (opinion of Kagan, J.). Presumptions have
their place in statutory interpretation, but only to the extent
that they approximate reality. Chevron ’s presumption does
not, because “[a]n ambiguity is simply not a delegation of
law-interpreting power. Chevron confuses the two.” C.
Sunstein, Interpreting Statutes in the Regulatory State, 103 Harv.
L. Rev. 405, 445 (1989). As Chevron itself noted,
ambiguities may result from an inability on the part of Congress to
squarely answer the question at hand, or from a failure to even
“consider the question” with the requisite precision. 467
U. S., at 865. In neither case does an ambiguity necessarily
reflect a congressional intent that an agency, as opposed to a
court, resolve the resulting interpretive question. And many or
perhaps most statutory ambiguities may be unintentional. As the
Framers recognized, ambiguities will inevitably follow from “the
complexity of objects, . . . the imperfection of the
human faculties,” and the simple fact that “no language is so
copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea.” The
Federalist No. 37, at 236.

															Courts, after all, routinely confront statutory
ambiguities in cases having nothing to do with Chevron —cases
that do not involve agency interpretations or delegations of
authority. Of course, when faced with a statutory ambiguity in such
a case, the ambiguity is not a delegation to anybody, and a court
is not somehow relieved of its obligation to independently
interpret the statute. Courts in that situation do not throw up
their hands because “Congress’s instructions have” supposedly “run
out,” leaving a statutory “gap.” Post , at 2 (opinion of
Kagan, J.). Courts instead understand that such statutes, no matter
how impenetrable, do—in fact, must—have a single, best meaning.
That is the whole point of having written statutes; “every
statute’s meaning is fixed at the time of enactment.” Wisconsin
Central Ltd. v. United States , 585 U.S. 274, 284 (2018)
(emphasis deleted). So instead of declaring a particular party’s
reading “permissible” in such a case, courts use every tool at
their disposal to determine the best reading of the statute and
resolve the ambiguity.

															In an agency case as in any other, though, even
if some judges might (or might not) consider the statute ambiguous,
there is a best reading all the same—“the reading the court would
have reached” if no agency were involved. Chevron , 467
U. S., at 843, n. 11. It therefore makes no sense to
speak of a “permissible” interpretation that is not the one the
court, after applying all relevant interpretive tools, concludes is
best. In the business of statutory interpretation, if it is not the
best, it is not permissible.

															Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron ’s
presumption is misguided because agencies have no special
competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do. The
Framers, as noted, anticipated that courts would often confront
statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them
by exercising independent legal judgment. And even Chevron itself reaffirmed that “[t]he judiciary is the final authority on
issues of statutory construction” and recognized that “in the
absence of an administrative interpretation,” it is “necessary” for
a court to “impose its own construction on the statute.” Id. , at 843, and n. 9. Chevron gravely erred,
though, in concluding that the inquiry is fundamentally different
just because an administrative interpretation is in play. The very
point of the traditional tools of statutory construction—the tools
courts use every day—is to resolve statutory ambiguities. That is
no less true when the ambiguity is about the scope of an agency’s
own power—perhaps the occasion on which abdication in favor of the
agency is least appropriate.

															2

															The Government responds that Congress must
generally intend for agencies to resolve statutory ambiguities
because agencies have subject matter expertise regarding the
statutes they administer; because deferring to agencies purportedly
promotes the uniform construction of federal law; and because
resolving statutory ambiguities can involve policymaking best left
to political actors, rather than courts. See Brief for Respondents
in No. 22–1219, pp. 16–19. The dissent offers more of the
same. See post , at 9–14. But none of these considerations
justifies Chevron ’s sweeping presumption of congressional
intent.

															Beginning with expertise, we recently noted that
interpretive issues arising in connection with a regulatory scheme
often “may fall more naturally into a judge’s bailiwick” than an
agency’s. Kisor , 588 U. S., at 578 (opinion of the
Court). We thus observed that “[w]hen the agency has no comparative
expertise in resolving a regulatory ambiguity, Congress presumably
would not grant it that authority.” Ibid. Chevron ’s
broad rule of deference, though, demands that courts presume just
the opposite. Under that rule, ambiguities of all stripes trigger
deference. Indeed, the Government and, seemingly, the dissent
continue to defend the proposition that Chevron applies even
in cases having little to do with an agency’s technical subject
matter expertise. See Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219,
p. 17; post , at 10.

															But even when an ambiguity happens to implicate
a technical matter, it does not follow that Congress has taken the
power to authoritatively interpret the statute from the courts and
given it to the agency. Congress expects courts to handle technical
statutory questions. “[M]any statutory cases” call upon “courts
[to] interpret the mass of technical detail that is the ordinary
diet of the law,” Egelhoff v. Egelhoff , 532 U.S.
141 , 161 (2001) (Breyer, J., dissenting), and courts did so
without issue in agency cases before Chevron , see post , at 30 (Gorsuch, J., concurring). Courts, after all, do
not decide such questions blindly. The parties and amici in
such cases are steeped in the subject matter, and reviewing courts
have the benefit of their perspectives. In an agency case in
particular, the court will go about its task with the agency’s
“body of experience and informed judgment,” among other
information, at its disposal. Skidmore , 323 U. S., at
140. And although an agency’s interpretation of a statute “cannot
bind a court,” it may be especially informative “to the extent it
rests on factual premises within [the agency’s] expertise.” Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms v. FLRA , 464 U.S.
89 , 98, n. 8 (1983). Such expertise has always been one of
the factors which may give an Executive Branch interpretation
particular “power to persuade, if lacking power to control.” Skidmore , 323 U. S., at 140; see, e.g. , County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund , 590 U.S. 165,
180 (2020); Moore , 95 U. S., at 763.

															For those reasons, delegating ultimate
interpretive authority to agencies is simply not necessary to
ensure that the resolution of statutory ambiguities is well
informed by subject matter expertise. The better presumption is
therefore that Congress expects courts to do their ordinary job of
interpreting statutes, with due respect for the views of the
Executive Branch. And to the extent that Congress and the Executive
Branch may disagree with how the courts have performed that job in
a particular case, they are of course always free to act by
revising the statute.

															Nor does a desire for the uniform construction
of federal law justify Chevron . Given inconsistencies in how
judges apply Chevron , see infra , at 30–33, it is
unclear how much the doctrine as a whole (as opposed to its highly
deferential second step) actually promotes such uniformity. In any
event, there is little value in imposing a uniform interpretation
of a statute if that interpretation is wrong. We see no reason to
presume that Congress prefers uniformity for uniformity’s sake over
the correct interpretation of the laws it enacts.

															The view that interpretation of ambiguous
statutory provisions amounts to policymaking suited for political
actors rather than courts is especially mistaken, for it rests on a
profound misconception of the judicial role. It is reasonable to
assume that Congress intends to leave policymaking to political
actors. But resolution of statutory ambiguities involves legal
interpretation. That task does not suddenly become policymaking
just because a court has an “agency to fall back on.” Kisor ,
588 U. S., at 575 (opinion of the Court). Courts interpret
statutes, no matter the context, based on the traditional tools of
statutory construction, not individual policy preferences. Indeed,
the Framers crafted the Constitution to ensure that federal judges
could exercise judgment free from the influence of the political
branches. See The Federalist, No. 78, at 522–525. They were to
construe the law with “[c]lear heads . . . and honest
hearts,” not with an eye to policy preferences that had not made it
into the statute. 1 Works of James Wilson 363 (J. Andrews ed.
1896).

															That is not to say that Congress cannot or does
not confer discretionary authority on agencies. Congress may do so,
subject to constitutional limits, and it often has. But to stay out
of discretionary policymaking left to the political branches,
judges need only fulfill their obligations under the APA to
independently identify and respect such delegations of authority,
police the outer statutory boundaries of those delegations, and
ensure that agencies exercise their discretion consistent with the
APA. By forcing courts to instead pretend that ambiguities are
necessarily delegations, Chevron does not prevent judges
from making policy. It prevents them from judging.

															3

															In truth, Chevron ’s justifying
presumption is, as Members of this Court have often recognized, a
fiction. See Buffington v. McDonough , 598 U. S.
___, ___ (2022) (Gorsuch, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari)
(slip op., at 11); Cuozzo , 579 U. S., at 286 (Thomas,
J., concurring); Scalia, 1989 Duke L. J., at 517; see also post , at 15 (opinion of Kagan, J.). So we have spent the
better part of four decades imposing one limitation on Chevron after another, pruning its presumption on the
understanding that “where it is in doubt that Congress actually
intended to delegate particular interpretive authority to an
agency, Chevron is ‘inapplicable.’ ” United
States v. Mead Corp. , 533 U.S.
218 , 230 (2001) (quoting Christensen v. Harris
County , 529 U.S.
576 , 597 (2000) (Breyer, J., dissenting)); see also Adams
Fruit Co. v. Barrett , 494 U.S.
638 , 649 (1990).

															Consider the many refinements we have made in an
effort to match Chevron ’s presumption to reality. We have
said that Chevron applies only “when it appears that
Congress delegated authority to the agency generally to make rules
carrying the force of law, and that the agency interpretation
claiming deference was promulgated in the exercise of that
authority.” Mead , 533 U. S., at 226–227. In practice,
that threshold requirement—sometimes called Chevron “step
zero”—largely limits Chevron to “the fruits of
notice-and-comment rulemaking or formal adjudication.” 533
U. S., at 230. But even when those processes are used,
deference is still not warranted “where the regulation is
‘procedurally defective’—that is, where the agency errs by failing
to follow the correct procedures in issuing the regulation.” Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro , 579 U.S. 211, 220
(2016) (quoting Mead , 533 U. S., at 227).

															Even where those procedural hurdles are cleared,
substantive ones remain. Most notably, Chevron does not
apply if the question at issue is one of “deep ‘economic and
political significance.’ ” King v. Burwell , 576 U.S.
473 , 486 (2015). We have instead expected Congress to delegate
such authority “expressly” if at all, ibid. , for
“[e]xtraordinary grants of regulatory authority are rarely
accomplished through ‘modest words,’ ‘vague terms,’ or ‘subtle
device[s],’ ” West Virginia v. EPA , 597 U.S.
697, 723 (2022) (quoting Whitman v. American Trucking
Assns., Inc. , 531 U.S.
457 , 468 (2001); alteration in original). Nor have we applied Chevron to agency interpretations of judicial review
provisions, see Adams Fruit Co. , 494 U. S., at 649–650,
or to statutory schemes not administered by the agency seeking
deference, see Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis , 584 U.S.
497, 519–520 (2018). And we have sent mixed signals on whether Chevron applies when a statute has criminal applications.
Compare Abramski v. United States , 573 U.S.
169 , 191 (2014), with Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter,
Communities for Great Ore. , 515 U.S.
687 , 704, n. 18 (1995).

															Confronted with this byzantine set of
preconditions and exceptions, some courts have simply bypassed Chevron , saying it makes no difference for one reason or
another.[ 7 ] And even when they
do invoke Chevron , courts do not always heed the various
steps and nuances of that evolving doctrine. In one of the cases
before us today, for example, the First Circuit both skipped “step
zero,” see 62 F. 4th, at 628, and refused to “classify [its]
conclusion as a product of Chevron step one or step
two”—though it ultimately appears to have deferred under step two, id. , at 634.

															This Court, for its part, has not deferred to an
agency interpretation under Chevron since 2016. See Cuozzo , 579 U. S., at 280 (most recent occasion). But Chevron remains on the books. So litigants must continue to
wrestle with it, and lower courts—bound by even our crumbling
precedents, see Agostini v. Felton , 521 U.S.
203 , 238 (1997)—understandably continue to apply it.

															The experience of the last 40 years has thus
done little to rehabilitate Chevron . It has only made clear
that Chevron ’s fictional presumption of congressional intent
was always unmoored from the APA’s demand that courts exercise
independent judgment in construing statutes administered by
agencies. At best, our intricate Chevron doctrine has been
nothing more than a distraction from the question that matters:
Does the statute authorize the challenged agency action? And at
worst, it has required courts to violate the APA by yielding to an
agency the express responsibility, vested in “the reviewing court ,” to “decide all relevant questions of law” and
“interpret . . . statutory provisions.” §706 (emphasis
added).

															IV

															The only question left is whether stare
decisis , the doctrine governing judicial adherence to
precedent, requires us to persist in the Chevron project. It
does not. Stare decisis is not an “inexorable command,” Payne v. Tennessee , 501 U.S.
808 , 828 (1991), and the stare decisis considerations
most relevant here—“the quality of [the precedent’s] reasoning, the
workability of the rule it established, . . . and
reliance on the decision,” Knick v. Township of
Scott , 588 U.S. 180, 203 (2019) (quoting Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees , 585 U.S. 878, 917
(2018))—all weigh in favor of letting Chevron go. Chevron has proved to be fundamentally
misguided. Despite reshaping judicial review of agency action,
neither it nor any case of ours applying it grappled with the
APA—the statute that lays out how such review works. Its flaws were
nonetheless apparent from the start, prompting this Court to revise
its foundations and continually limit its application. It has
launched and sustained a cottage industry of scholars attempting to
decipher its basis and meaning. And Members of this Court have long
questioned its premises. See, e . g ., Pereira v. Sessions , 585 U.S. 198, 219–221 (2018) (Kennedy, J.,
concurring); Michigan , 576 U. S., at 760–764
(Thomas, J., concurring); Buffington , 598 U. S.
___ (opinion of Gorsuch, J.); B. Kavanaugh, Fixing Statutory
Interpretation, 129 Harv. L. Rev. 2118, 2150–2154 (2016). Even
Justice Scalia, an early champion of Chevron , came to
seriously doubt whether it could be reconciled with the APA. See Perez , 575 U. S., at 109–110 (opinion concurring in
judgment). For its entire existence, Chevron has been a
“rule in search of a justification,” Knick , 588 U. S.,
at 204, if it was ever coherent enough to be called a rule at
all.

															Experience has also shown that Chevron is
unworkable. The defining feature of its framework is the
identification of statutory ambiguity, which requires deference at
the doctrine’s second step. But the concept of ambiguity has always
evaded meaningful definition. As Justice Scalia put the dilemma
just five years after Chevron was decided: “How clear is
clear?” 1989 Duke L. J., at 521.

															We are no closer to an answer to that question
than we were four decades ago. “ ‘[A]mbiguity’ is a term that
may have different meanings for different judges.” Exxon Mobil
Corp. v. Allapattah Services, Inc. , 545 U.S.
546 , 572 (2005) (Stevens, J., dissenting). One judge might see
ambiguity everywhere; another might never encounter it. Compare L.
Silberman, Chevron—The Intersection of Law & Policy, 58 Geo.
Wash. L. Rev. 821, 822 (1990), with R. Kethledge, Ambiguities
and Agency Cases: Reflections After (Almost) Ten Years on the
Bench, 70 Vand. L. Rev. En Banc 315, 323 (2017). A rule of law
that is so wholly “in the eye of the beholder,” Exxon Mobil
Corp. , 545 U. S., at 572 (Stevens, J., dissenting),
invites different results in like cases and is therefore “arbitrary
in practice,” Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. v. Mayacamas
Corp. , 485 U.S.
271 , 283 (1988). Such an impressionistic and malleable concept
“cannot stand as an every-day test for allocating” interpretive
authority between courts and agencies. Swift & Co. v. Wickham , 382 U.S.
111 , 125 (1965).

															The dissent proves the point. It tells us that a
court should reach Chevron ’s second step when it finds, “at
the end of its interpretive work,” that “Congress has left an
ambiguity or gap.” Post , at 1–2. (The Government offers a
similar test. See Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219, pp. 7,
10, 14; Tr. of Oral Arg. 113–114, 116.) That is no guide at all.
Once more, the basic nature and meaning of a statute does not
change when an agency happens to be involved. Nor does it change
just because the agency has happened to offer its interpretation
through the sort of procedures necessary to obtain deference, or
because the other preconditions for Chevron happen to be
satisfied. The statute still has a best meaning, necessarily
discernible by a court deploying its full interpretive toolkit. So
for the dissent’s test to have any meaning, it must think that in
an agency case (unlike in any other), a court should give up on its
“interpretive work” before it has identified that best meaning. But
how does a court know when to do so? On that point, the dissent
leaves a gap of its own. It protests only that some other
interpretive tools—all with pedigrees more robust than Chevron ’s, and all designed to help courts identify the
meaning of a text rather than allow the Executive Branch to
displace it—also apply to ambiguous texts. See post , at 27.
That this is all the dissent can come up with, after four decades
of judicial experience attempting to identify ambiguity under Chevron , reveals the futility of the exercise.[ 8 ]

															Because Chevron in its original, two-step
form was so indeterminate and sweeping, we have instead been forced
to clarify the doctrine again and again. Our attempts to do so have
only added to Chevron ’s unworkability, transforming the
original two-step into a dizzying breakdance. See Adams Fruit
Co. , 494 U. S., at 649–650; Mead , 533 U. S.,
at 226–227; King , 576 U. S., at 486; Encino
Motorcars , 579 U. S., at 220; Epic Systems , 584
U. S., at 519–520; on and on. And the doctrine continues to
spawn difficult threshold questions that promise to further
complicate the inquiry should Chevron be retained. See, e . g ., Cargill v. Garland , 57 F. 4th
447, 465–468 (CA5 2023) (plurality opinion) (May the Government
waive reliance on Chevron ? Does Chevron apply to
agency interpretations of statutes imposing criminal penalties?
Does Chevron displace the rule of lenity?), aff ’d, 602
U. S. ___ (2024).

															Four decades after its inception, Chevron has thus become an impediment, rather than an aid, to accomplishing
the basic judicial task of “say[ing] what the law is.” Marbury , 1 Cranch, at 177. And its continuing import is far
from clear. Courts have often declined to engage with the doctrine,
saying it makes no difference. See n. 7, supra . And as
noted, we have avoided deferring under Chevron since 2016.
That trend is nothing new; for decades, we have often declined to
invoke Chevron even in those cases where it might appear to
be applicable. See W. Eskridge & L. Baer, The Continuum of
Deference: Supreme Court Treatment of Agency Statutory
Interpretations From Chevron to Hamdan , 96 Geo.
L. J. 1083, 1125 (2008). At this point, all that remains of Chevron is a decaying husk with bold pretensions.

															Nor has Chevron been the sort of
“ ‘stable background’ rule” that fosters meaningful reliance. Post , at 8, n. 1 (opinion of Kagan, J.) (quoting Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. , 561 U.S.
247 , 261 (2010)). Given our constant tinkering with and
eventual turn away from Chevron , and its inconsistent
application by the lower courts, it instead is hard to see how
anyone—Congress included—could reasonably expect a court to rely on Chevron in any particular case. And even if it were possible
to predict accurately when courts will apply Chevron , the
doctrine “does not provide ‘a clear or easily applicable standard,
so arguments for reliance based on its clarity are
misplaced.’ ” Janus , 585 U. S., at 927 (quoting South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. , 585 U.S. 162, 186
(2018)). To plan on Chevron yielding a particular result is
to gamble not only that the doctrine will be invoked, but also that
it will produce readily foreseeable outcomes and the stability that
comes with them. History has proved neither bet to be a winning
proposition.

															Rather than safeguarding reliance interests, Chevron affirmatively destroys them. Under Chevron , a
statutory ambiguity, no matter why it is there, becomes a license
authorizing an agency to change positions as much as it likes, with
“[u]nexplained inconsistency” being “at most . . . a
reason for holding an interpretation to be . . .
arbitrary and capricious.” Brand X , 545 U. S., at 981.
But statutory ambiguity, as we have explained, is not a reliable
indicator of actual delegation of discretionary authority to
agencies. Chevron thus allows agencies to change course even
when Congress has given them no power to do so. By its sheer
breadth, Chevron fosters unwarranted instability in the law,
leaving those attempting to plan around agency action in an eternal
fog of uncertainty. Chevron accordingly has undermined the
very “rule of law” values that stare decisis exists to
secure. Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community , 572 U.S.
782 , 798 (2014). And it cannot be constrained by admonishing
courts to be extra careful, or by tacking on a new batch of
conditions. We would need to once again “revis[e] its theoretical
basis . . . in order to cure its practical deficiencies.” Montejo v. Louisiana , 556 U.S.
778 , 792 (2009). Stare decisis does not require us to do
so, especially because any refinements we might make would only
point courts back to their duties under the APA to “decide all
relevant questions of law” and “interpret . . . statutory
provisions.” §706. Nor is there any reason to wait helplessly for
Congress to correct our mistake. The Court has jettisoned many
precedents that Congress likewise could have legislatively
overruled. See, e.g. , Patterson v. McLean Credit
Union , 485 U.S.
617 , 618 (1988) ( per curiam ) (collecting cases). And
part of “judicial humility,” post , at 3, 25 (opinion of
Kagan, J.,), is admitting and in certain cases correcting our own
mistakes, especially when those mistakes are serious, see post , at 8–9 (opinion of Gorsuch, J.).

															This is one of those cases. Chevron was a
judicial invention that required judges to disregard their
statutory duties. And the only way to “ensure that the law will not
merely change erratically, but will develop in a principled and
intelligible fashion,” Vasquez v. Hillery , 474 U.S.
254 , 265 (1986), is for us to leave Chevron behind.

															By doing so, however, we do not call into
question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework.
The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are
lawful—including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself—are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite
our change in interpretive methodology. See CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries , 553 U.S.
442 , 457 (2008). Mere reliance on Chevron cannot
constitute a “ ‘special justification’ ” for overruling
such a holding, because to say a precedent relied on Chevron is, at best, “just an argument that the precedent was wrongly
decided.” Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund,
Inc. , 573 U.S.
258 , 266 (2014) (quoting Dickerson v. United
States , 530 U.S.
428 , 443 (2000)). That is not enough to justify overruling a
statutory precedent.

															*  *  *

															The dissent ends by quoting Chevron :
“ ‘Judges are not experts in the field.’ ” Post ,
at 31 (quoting 467 U. S., at 865). That depends, of course, on
what the “field” is. If it is legal interpretation, that has been,
“emphatically,” “the province and duty of the judicial department”
for at least 221 years. Marbury , 1 Cranch, at 177. The rest
of the dissent’s selected epigraph is that judges “ ‘are not
part of either political branch.’ ” Post , at 31
(quoting Chevron , 467 U. S., at 865). Indeed. Judges
have always been expected to apply their “judgment” independent of the political branches when interpreting the
laws those branches enact. The Federalist No. 78, at 523. And one
of those laws, the APA, bars judges from disregarding that
responsibility just because an Executive Branch agency views a
statute differently. Chevron is overruled. Courts must
exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency
has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires.
Careful attention to the judgment of the Executive Branch may help
inform that inquiry. And when a particular statute delegates
authority to an agency consistent with constitutional limits,
courts must respect the delegation, while ensuring that the agency
acts within it. But courts need not and under the APA may not defer
to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is
ambiguous.

															Because the D. C. and First Circuits relied
on Chevron in deciding whether to uphold the Rule, their
judgments are vacated, and the cases are remanded for further
proceedings consistent with this opinion.

															It is so ordered. Notes 1 For any landlubbers,
“F/V” is simply the designation for a fishing vessel. 2 Both petitions also
presented questions regarding the consistency of the Rule with the
MSA. See Pet. for Cert. in No. 22–451, p. i; Pet. for Cert. in
No. 22–1219, p. ii. We did not grant certiorari with respect
to those questions and thus do not reach them. 3 The dissent plucks out Gray , Hearst , and—to “gild the lily,” in its
telling—three more 1940s decisions, claiming they reflect the
relevant historical tradition of judicial review. Post , at
21–22, and n. 6 (opinion of Kagan, J.). But it has no
substantial response to the fact that Gray and Hearst themselves endorsed, implicitly in one case and explicitly in the
next, the traditional rule that “questions of statutory
interpretation . . . are for the courts to resolve,
giving appropriate weight”—not outright deference—“to the judgment
of those whose special duty is to administer the questioned
statute.” Hearst , 322 U. S., at 130–131. And it fails
to recognize the deep roots that this rule has in our Nation’s
judicial tradition, to the limited extent it engages with that
tradition at all. See post , at 20–21, n. 5. Instead,
like the Government, it strains to equate the “respect” or “weight”
traditionally afforded to Executive Branch interpretations with
binding deference. See ibid. ; Brief for Respondents in No.
22–1219, pp. 21–24. That supposed equivalence is a fiction.
The dissent’s cases establish that a “ contemporaneous construction” shared by “not only . . . the
courts” but also “the departments” could be “controlling,” Schell’s Executors v. Fauché , 138
U.S. 562 , 572 (1891) (emphasis added), and that courts might
“lean in favor” of a “contemporaneous” and “continued” construction
of the Executive Branch as strong evidence of a statute’s meaning, United States v. Alabama Great Southern R. Co. , 142 U.S.
615 , 621 (1892). They do not establish that Executive Branch
interpretations of ambiguous statutes—no matter how inconsistent,
late breaking, or flawed—always bound the courts. In
reality, a judge was never “bound to adopt the construction given
by the head of a department.” Decatur v. Paulding , 14
Pet. 497, 515 (1840). 4 The dissent observes that
Section 706 does not say expressly that courts are to decide legal
questions using “a de novo standard of review.” Post , at 16. That much is true. But statutes can be sensibly
understood only “by reviewing text in context.” Pulsifer v. United States , 601 U.S. 124, 133 (2024). Since the start of
our Republic, courts have “decide[d] . . . questions of
law” and “interpret[ed] constitutional and statutory provisions” by
applying their own legal judgment. §706. Setting aside its
misplaced reliance on Gray and Hearst , the dissent
does not and could not deny that tradition. But it nonetheless
insists that to codify that tradition, Congress needed to expressly
reject a sort of deference the courts had never before applied—and
would not apply for several decades to come. It did not. “The
notion that some things ‘go without saying’ applies to legislation
just as it does to everyday life.” Bond v. United
States , 572 U.S.
844 , 857 (2014). 5 See, e.g. , 29
U. S. C. §213(a)(15) (exempting from provisions of the
Fair Labor Standards Act “any employee employed on a casual basis
in domestic service employment to provide companionship services
for individuals who (because of age or infirmity) are unable to
care for themselves ( as such terms are defined and delimited by
regulations of the Secretary )” (emphasis added)); 42
U. S. C. §5846(a)(2) (requiring notification to Nuclear
Regulatory Commission when a facility or activity licensed or
regulated pursuant to the Atomic Energy Act “contains a defect
which could create a substantial safety hazard, as defined by
regulations which the Commission shall promulgate ” (emphasis
added)). 6 See, e.g. , 33
U. S. C. §1312(a) (requiring establishment of effluent
limitations “[w]henever, in the judgment of the [Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA)] Administrator . . . , discharges
of pollutants from a point source or group of point sources
. . . would interfere with the attainment or maintenance
of that water quality . . . which shall assure” various
outcomes, such as the “protection of public health” and “public
water supplies”); 42 U. S. C. §7412(n)(1)(A) (directing
EPA to regulate power plants “if the Administrator finds such
regulation is appropriate and necessary”). 7 See, e . g ., Guedes v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives , 45 F. 4th 306, 313–314 (CADC 2022), abrogated
by Garland v. Cargill , 602 U. S. ___ (2024); County of Amador v. United States Dept. of Interior ,
872 F.3d 1012, 1021–1022 (CA9 2017); Estrada-Rodriguez v. Lynch , 825 F.3d 397, 403–404 (CA8 2016); Nielsen v. AECOM Tech. Corp. , 762 F.3d 214, 220 (CA2 2014); Alaska
Stock, LLC v. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. ,
747 F.3d 673, 685, n. 52 (CA9 2014); Jurado-Delgado v. Attorney Gen. of U. S. , 498 Fed. Appx. 107, 117 (CA3
2009); see also D. Brookins, Confusion in the Circuit Courts: How
the Circuit Courts Are Solving the Mead -Puzzle by Avoiding
It Altogether, 85 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1484, 1496–1499 (2017)
(documenting Chevron avoidance by the lower courts); A.
Vermeule, Our Schmittian Administrative Law, 122 Harv. L. Rev.
1095, 1127–1129 (2009) (same); L. Bressman, How Mead Has
Muddled Judicial Review of Agency Action, 58 Vand. L. Rev.
1443, 1464–1466 (2005) (same). 8 Citing an empirical
study, the dissent adds that Chevron “fosters agreement among judges.” Post , at 28. It is hardly
surprising that a study might find as much; Chevron ’s second
step is supposed to be hospitable to agency interpretations. So
when judges get there, they tend to agree that the agency wins.
That proves nothing about the supposed ease or predictability of
identifying ambiguity in the first place. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

															_________________

															Nos. 22–451 and 22–1219

															_________________

															LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES, et al.,
PETITIONERS

															22–451 v. GINA RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF COMMERCE,
et al.

															on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the district of columbia circuit

															RELENTLESS, INC., et al.,
PETITIONERS

															22–1219 v. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, et al.

															on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the first circuit

															[June 28, 2024]

															Justice Thomas, concurring.

															I join the Court’s opinion in full because it
correctly concludes that Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. , 467 U.S.
837 (1984), must finally be overruled. Under Chevron , a
judge was required to adopt an agency’s interpretation of an
ambiguous statute, so long as the agency had a “permissible
construction of the statute.” See id. , at 843. As the Court
explains, that deference does not comport with the Administrative
Procedure Act, which requires judges to decide “all relevant
questions of law” and “interpret constitutional and statutory
provisions” when reviewing an agency action. 5 U. S. C.
§706; see also ante, at 18–23; Baldwin v. United
States , 589 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2020) (Thomas, J.,
dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op., at 4–5).

															I write separately to underscore a more
fundamental problem: Chevron deference also violates our
Constitution’s separation of powers, as I have previously explained
at length. See Baldwin , 589 U. S., at ___–___
(dissenting opinion) (slip op., at 2–4); Michigan v. EPA , 576 U.S.
743 , 761–763 (2015) (concurring opinion); see also Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Assn. , 575 U.S.
92 , 115–118 (2015) (opinion concurring in judgment). And, I
agree with Justice Gorsuch that we should not overlook Chevron ’s constitutional defects in overruling it.[ 1 ]* Post , at 15–20 (concurring
opinion). To provide “practical and real protections for individual
liberty,” the Framers drafted a Constitution that divides the
legislative, executive, and judicial powers between three branches
of Government. Perez , 575 U. S., at 118 (opinion of
Thomas, J.). Chevron deference compromises this separation
of powers in two ways. It curbs the judicial power afforded to
courts, and simultaneously expands agencies’ executive power beyond
constitutional limits. Chevron compels judges to abdicate their
Article III “judicial Power.” §1. “[T]he judicial power, as
originally understood, requires a court to exercise its independent
judgment in interpreting and expounding upon the laws.” Perez , 575 U. S., at 119 (opinion of Thomas, J.);
accord, post , at 17–18 (opinion of Gorsuch, J.). The Framers
understood that “legal texts . . . often contain
ambiguities,” and that the judicial power included “the power to
resolve these ambiguities over time.” Perez , 575 U. S.,
at 119 (opinion of Thomas, J.); accord, ante, at 7–9. But,
under Chevron , a judge must accept an agency’s
interpretation of an ambiguous law, even if he thinks another
interpretation is correct. Ante , at 19. Chevron deference thus prevents judges from exercising their independent
judgment to resolve ambiguities. Baldwin , 589 U. S., at
___ (opinion of Thomas, J.) (slip op., at 3); see also Michigan , 576 U. S., at 761 (opinion of Thomas, J.);
see also Perez , 575 U. S., at 123 (opinion of Thomas,
J.). By tying a judge’s hands, Chevron prevents the
Judiciary from serving as a constitutional check on the Executive.
It allows “the Executive . . . to dictate the outcome of
cases through erroneous interpretations.” Baldwin , 589
U. S., at ___ (opinion of Thomas, J.) (slip op., at 4); Michigan , 576 U. S., at 763, n. 1 (opinion of Thomas,
J.); see also Perez , 575 U. S., at 124 (opinion of
Thomas, J.). Because the judicial power requires judges to exercise
their independent judgment, the deference that Chevron requires contravenes Article III’s mandate. Chevron deference also permits the
Executive Branch to exercise powers not given to it. “When the
Government is called upon to perform a function that requires an
exercise of legislative, executive, or judicial power, only the
vested recipient of that power can perform it.” Department of
Transportation v. Association of American Railroads , 575 U.S.
43 , 68 (2015) (Thomas, J., concurring in judgment). Because the
Constitution gives the Executive Branch only “[t]he executive
Power,” executive agencies may constitutionally exercise only that
power. Art. II, §1, cl. 1. But, Chevron gives
agencies license to exercise judicial power. By allowing agencies
to definitively interpret laws so long as they are ambiguous, Chevron “transfer[s]” the Judiciary’s “interpretive judgment
to the agency.” Perez , 575 U. S., at 124 (opinion of
Thomas, J.); see also Baldwin , 589 U. S., at ___
(opinion of Thomas, J.) (slip op., at 4); Michigan , 576
U. S., at 761–762 (opinion of Thomas, J.); post , at 18
(Gorsuch, J., concurring). Chevron deference “cannot be salvaged” by
recasting it as deference to an agency’s “formulation of policy.” Baldwin , 589 U. S., at ___ (opinion of Thomas, J.)
(internal quotation marks omitted) (slip op., at 3). If that were
true, Chevron would mean that “agencies are
unconstitutionally exercising ‘legislative Powers’ vested in
Congress.” Baldwin , 589 U. S., at ___ (opinion of
Thomas, J.) (slip op., at 3) (quoting Art. I, §1). By “giv[ing] the
force of law to agency pronouncements on matters of private conduct
as to which Congress did not actually have an intent,” Chevron “permit[s] a body other than Congress to perform a
function that requires an exercise of legislative power.” Michigan , 576 U. S., at 762 (opinion of Thomas, J.)
(internal quotation marks omitted). No matter the gloss put on it, Chevron expands agencies’ power beyond the bounds of Article
II by permitting them to exercise powers reserved to another branch
of Government. Chevron deference was “not a harmless
transfer of power.” Baldwin , 589 U. S., at ___ (opinion
of Thomas, J.) (slip op., at 3). “The Constitution carefully
imposes structural constraints on all three branches, and the
exercise of power free of those accompanying restraints subverts
the design of the Constitution’s ratifiers.” Ibid . In
particular, the Founders envisioned that “the courts [would] check
the Executive by applying the correct interpretation of the law.” Id ., at ___ (slip op., at 4). Chevron was thus a
fundamental disruption of our separation of powers. It improperly
strips courts of judicial power by simultaneously increasing the
power of executive agencies. By overruling Chevron , we
restore this aspect of our separation of powers. To safeguard
individual liberty, “[s]tructure is everything.” A. Scalia,
Foreword: The Importance of Structure in Constitutional
Interpretation, 83 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1417, 1418 (2008).
Although the Court finally ends our 40-year misadventure with Chevron deference, its more profound problems should not be
overlooked. Regardless of what a statute says, the type of
deference required by Chevron violates the Constitution. Notes 1 *There is much to be commended
in Justice Gorsuch’s careful consideration from first principles of
the weight we should afford to our precedent. I agree with the
lion’s share of his concurrence. See generally Gamble v. United States , 587 U.S. 678, 710 (2019) (Thomas, J.,
concurring). SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

															_________________

															Nos. 22–451 and 22–1219

															_________________

															LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES, et al.,
PETITIONERS

															22–451 v. GINA RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF COMMERCE,
et al.

															on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the district of columbia circuit

															RELENTLESS, INC., et al.,
PETITIONERS

															22–1219 v. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, et al.

															on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the first circuit

															[June 28, 2024]

															Justice Gorsuch, concurring.

															In disputes between individuals and the
government about the meaning of a federal law, federal courts have
traditionally sought to offer independent judgments about “what the
law is” without favor to either side. Marbury v. Madison , 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). Beginning in the
mid-1980s, however, this Court experimented with a radically
different approach. Applying Chevron deference, judges began
deferring to the views of executive agency officials about the
meaning of federal statutes. See Chevron U. S. A.
Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. , 467 U.S.
837 (1984). With time, the error of this approach became widely
appreciated. So much so that this Court has refused to apply Chevron deference since 2016. Today, the Court places a
tombstone on Chevron no one can miss. In doing so, the Court
returns judges to interpretive rules that have guided federal
courts since the Nation’s founding. I write separately to address
why the proper application of the doctrine of stare decisis supports that course.

															I

															A

															Today, the phrase “common law judge” may call
to mind a judicial titan of the past who brilliantly devised new
legal rules on his own. The phrase “ stare decisis ” might
conjure up a sense that judges who come later in time are strictly
bound to follow the work of their predecessors. But neither of
those intuitions fairly describes the traditional common-law
understanding of the judge’s role or the doctrine of stare
decisis .

															At common law, a judge’s charge to decide cases
was not usually understood as a license to make new law. For much
of England’s early history, different rulers and different legal
systems prevailed in different regions. As England consolidated
into a single kingdom governed by a single legal system, the
judge’s task was to examine those pre-existing legal traditions and
apply in the disputes that came to him those legal rules that were
“common to the whole land and to all Englishmen.” F. Maitland,
Equity, Also the Forms of Action at Common Law 2 (1929). That was
“common law” judging.

															This view of the judge’s role had consequences
for the authority due judicial decisions. Because a judge’s job was
to find and apply the law, not make it, the “opinion of the judge”
and “the law” were not considered “one and the same thing.” 1 W.
Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 71 (1765)
(Blackstone) (emphasis deleted). A judge’s decision might bind the
parties to the case at hand. M. Hale, The History and Analysis of
the Common Law of England 68 (1713) (Hale). But none of that meant
the judge had the power to “make a Law properly so called” for
society at large, “for that only the King and Parliament can do.” Ibid. Other consequences followed for the role
precedent played in future judicial proceedings. Because past
decisions represented something “less than a Law,” they did not
bind future judges. Ibid. At the same time, as Matthew Hale
put it, a future judge could give a past decision “Weight” as
“Evidence” of the law. Ibid. Expressing the same idea,
William Blackstone conceived of judicial precedents as “evidence”
of “the common law.” 1 Blackstone 69, 71. And much like other forms
of evidence, precedents at common law were thought to vary in the
weight due them. Some past decisions might supply future courts
with considerable guidance. But others might be entitled to lesser
weight, not least because judges are no less prone to error than
anyone else and they may sometimes “mistake” what the law demands. Id. , at 71 (emphasis deleted). In cases like that, both men
thought, a future judge should not rotely repeat a past mistake but
instead “vindicate” the law “from misrepresentation.” Id .,
at 70 . When examining past decisions as evidence of the
law, common law judges did not, broadly speaking, afford
overwhelming weight to any “single precedent.” J. Baker, An
Introduction to English Legal History 209–210 (5th ed. 2019).
Instead, a prior decision’s persuasive force depended in large
measure on its “Consonancy and Congruity with Resolutions and
Decisions of former Times.” Hale 68. An individual decision might
reflect the views of one court at one moment in time, but a
consistent line of decisions representing the wisdom of many minds
across many generations was generally considered stronger evidence
of the law’s meaning. Ibid. With this conception of precedent in mind, Lord
Mansfield cautioned against elevating “particular cases” above the
“general principles” that “run through the cases, and govern the
decision of them.” Rust v. Cooper , 2 Cowp. 629, 632,
98 Eng. Rep. 1277, 1279 (K. B. 1777). By discarding aberrational
rulings and pursuing instead the mainstream of past decisions, he
observed, the common law tended over time to “wor[k] itself pure.” Omychund v. Barker , 1 Atk. 22, 33, 26 Eng. Rep. 15,
23 (Ch. 1744) (emphasis deleted). Reflecting similar thinking,
Edmund Burke offered five principles for the evaluation of past
judicial decisions: “They ought to be shewn; first, to be numerous
and not scattered here and there;—secondly, concurrent and not
contradictory and mutually destructive;—thirdly, to be made in good
and constitutional times;—fourthly, not to be made to serve an
occasion;—and fifthly, to be agreeable to the general tenor of
legal principles.” Speech of Dec. 23, 1790, in 3 The Speeches of
the Right Honourable Edmund Burke 513 (1816).

															Not only did different decisions carry different
weight, so did different language within a decision. An opinion’s
holding and the reasoning essential to it (the ratio
decidendi ) merited careful attention. Dicta, stray remarks, and
digressions warranted less weight. See N. Duxbury, The Intricacies
of Dicta and Dissent 19–24 (2021) (Duxbury). These were no more
than “the vapours and fumes of law.” F. Bacon, The Lord Keeper’s
Speech in the Exchequer (1617), in 2 The Works of Francis Bacon 478
(B. Montagu ed. 1887) (Bacon).

															That is not to say those “vapours” were
worthless. Often dicta might provide the parties to a particular
dispute a “fuller understanding of the court’s decisional path or
related areas of concern.” B. Garner et al., The Law of
Judicial Precedent 65 (2016) (Precedent). Dicta might also provide
future courts with a source of “thoughtful advice.” Ibid. But future courts had to be careful not to treat every “hasty
expression . . . as a serious and deliberate opinion.” Steel v. Houghton , 1 Bl. H. 51, 53, 126 Eng. Rep. 32,
33 (C. P. 1788). To do so would work an “injustice to [the]
memory” of their predecessors who could not expect judicial remarks
issued in one context to apply perfectly in others, perhaps
especially ones they could not foresee. Ibid. Also, the
limits of the adversarial process, a distinctive feature of English
law, had to be borne in mind. When a single judge or a small panel
reached a decision in a case, they did so based on the factual
record and legal arguments the parties at hand have chosen to
develop. Attuned to those constraints, future judges had to proceed
with an open mind to the possibility that different facts and
different legal arguments might dictate different outcomes in later
disputes. See Duxbury 19–24.

															B

															Necessarily, this represents just a quick
sketch of traditional common-law understandings of the judge’s role
and the place of precedent in it. It focuses, too, on the
horizontal, not vertical, force of judicial precedents. But there
are good reasons to think that the common law’s understandings of
judges and precedent outlined above crossed the Atlantic and
informed the nature of the “judicial Power” the Constitution vests
in federal courts. Art. III, §1.

															Not only was the Constitution adopted against
the backdrop of these understandings and, in light of that alone,
they may provide evidence of what the framers meant when they spoke
of the “judicial Power.” Many other, more specific provisions in
the Constitution reflect much the same distinction between
lawmaking and lawfinding functions the common law did. The
Constitution provides that its terms may be amended only through
certain prescribed democratic processes. Art. V. It vests the power
to enact federal legislation exclusively in the people’s elected
representatives in Congress. Art. I, §1. Meanwhile, the
Constitution describes the judicial power as the power to resolve
cases and controversies. Art. III, §2, cl. 1. As well, it
delegates that authority to life-tenured judges, see §1, an
assignment that would have made little sense if judges could usurp
lawmaking powers vested in periodically elected representatives.
But one that makes perfect sense if what is sought is a neutral
party “to interpret and apply” the law without fear or favor in a
dispute between others. 2 The Works of James Wilson 161 (J. Andrews
ed. 1896) (Wilson); see Osborn v. Bank of United
States , 9 Wheat. 738, 866 (1824).

															The constrained view of the judicial power that
runs through our Constitution carries with it familiar
implications, ones the framers readily acknowledged. James Madison,
for example, proclaimed that it would be a “fallacy” to suggest
that judges or their precedents could “repeal or alter” the
Constitution or the laws of the United States. Letter to N. Trist
(Dec. 1831), in 9 The Writings of James Madison 477 (G. Hunt ed.
1910). A court’s opinion, James Wilson added, may be thought of as
“effective la[w]” “[a]s to the parties.” Wilson 160–161. But as in
England, Wilson said, a prior judicial decision could serve in a
future dispute only as “evidence” of the law’s proper construction. Id ., at 160; accord, 1 J. Kent, Commentaries on American Law
442–443 (1826).

															The framers also recognized that the judicial
power described in our Constitution implies, as the judicial power
did in England, a power (and duty) of discrimination when it comes
to assessing the “evidence” embodied in past decisions. So, for
example, Madison observed that judicial rulings “ repeatedly
confirmed ” may supply better evidence of the law’s
meaning than isolated or aberrant ones. Letter to C. Ingersoll
(June 1831), in 4 Letters and Other Writings of James Madison 184
(1867) (emphasis added). Extending the thought, Thomas Jefferson
believed it would often take “numerous decisions” for the meaning
of new statutes to become truly “settled.” Letter to S. Jones (July
1809), in 12 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson 299 (A. Bergh ed.
1907).

															From the start, too, American courts recognized
that not everything found in a prior decision was entitled to equal
weight. As Chief Justice Marshall warned, “It is a maxim not to be
disregarded, that general expressions, in every opinion, are to be
taken in connection with the case in which those expressions are
used.” Cohens v. Virginia , 6 Wheat. 264, 399 (1821).
To the extent a past court offered views “beyond the case,” those
expressions “may be respected” in a later case “but ought not to
control the judgment.” Ibid. One “obvious” reason for this,
Marshall continued, had to do with the limits of the adversarial
process we inherited from England: Only “[t]he question actually
before the Court is investigated with care, and considered in its
full extent. Other principles which may serve to illustrate it, are
considered in their relation to the case decided, but their
possible bearing on all other cases is seldom completely
investigated.” Id. , at 399–400.

															Abraham Lincoln championed these traditional
understandings in his debates with Stephen Douglas. Douglas took
the view that a single decision of this Court—no matter how
flawed—could definitively resolve a contested issue for everyone
and all time. Those who thought otherwise, he said, “aim[ed] a
deadly blow to our whole Republican system of government.” Speech
at Springfield, Ill. (June 26, 1857), in 2 The Collected Works of
Abraham Lincoln 401 (R. Basler ed. 1953) (Lincoln Speech). But
Lincoln knew better. While accepting that judicial decisions
“absolutely determine” the rights of the parties to a court’s
judgment, he refused to accept that any single judicial decision
could “fully settl[e]” an issue, particularly when that decision
departs from the Constitution. Id ., at 400–401. In cases
such as these, Lincoln explained, “it is not resistance, it is not
factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat [the decision] as
not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the
country.” Id. , at 401.

															After the Civil War, the Court echoed some of
these same points. It stressed that every statement in a judicial
opinion “must be taken in connection with its immediate context,” In re Ayers , 123 U.S.
443 , 488 (1887), and stray “remarks” must not be elevated above
the written law, see The Belfast , 7 Wall. 624, 641 (1869);
see also, e . g ., Trebilcock v. Wilson ,
12 Wall. 687, 692–693 (1872); Mason v. Eldred , 6
Wall. 231, 236–238 (1868). During Chief Justice Chase’s tenure, it
seems a Justice writing the Court’s majority opinion would
generally work alone and present his work orally and in summary
form to his colleagues at conference, which meant that other
Justices often did not even review the opinion prior to
publication. 6 C. Fairman, History of the Supreme Court of the
United States 69–70 (1971). The Court could proceed in this way
because it understood that a single judicial opinion may resolve a
“case or controversy,” and in so doing it may make “effective law”
for the parties, but it does not legislate for the whole of the
country and is not to be confused with laws that do.

															C

															From all this, I see at least three lessons
about the doctrine of stare decisis relevant to the decision
before us today. Each concerns a form of judicial humility. First , a past decision may bind the
parties to a dispute, but it provides this Court no authority in
future cases to depart from what the Constitution or laws of the
United States ordain. Instead, the Constitution promises, the
American people are sovereign and they alone may, through
democratically responsive processes, amend our foundational charter
or revise federal legislation. Unelected judges enjoy no such
power. Part I–B, supra .

															Recognizing as much, this Court has often said
that stare decisis is not an “ ‘inexorable
command.’ ” State Oil Co. v. Khan , 522 U.S.
3 , 20 (1997). And from time to time it has found it necessary
to correct its past mistakes. When it comes to correcting errors of
constitutional interpretation, the Court has stressed the
importance of doing so, for they can be corrected otherwise only
through the amendment process. See, e.g. , Franchise Tax
Bd. of Cal. v. Hyatt , 587 U.S. 230, 248 (2019). When it
comes to fixing errors of statutory interpretation, the Court has
proceeded perhaps more circumspectly. But in that field, too, it
has overruled even longstanding but “flawed” decisions. See, e.g. , Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc. , 551 U.S.
877 , 904, 907 (2007).

															Recent history illustrates all this. During the
tenures of Chief Justices Warren and Burger, it seems this Court
overruled an average of around three cases per Term, including
roughly 50 statutory precedents between the 1960s and 1980s alone.
See W. Eskridge, Overruling Statutory Precedents, 76 Geo.
L. J. 1361, 1427–1434 (1988) (collecting cases). Many of these
decisions came in settings no less consequential than today’s. In
recent years, we have not approached the pace set by our
predecessors, overruling an average of just one or two prior
decisions each Term.[ 1 ] But the
point remains: Judicial decisions inconsistent with the written law
do not inexorably control. Second , another lesson tempers the first.
While judicial decisions may not supersede or revise the
Constitution or federal statutory law, they merit our “respect as
embodying the considered views of those who have come before.” Ramos v. Louisiana , 590 U.S. 83, 105 (2020). As a
matter of professional responsibility, a judge must not only avoid
confusing his writings with the law. When a case comes before him,
he must also weigh his view of what the law demands against the
thoughtful views of his predecessors. After all, “[p]recedent is a
way of accumulating and passing down the learning of past
generations, a font of established wisdom richer than what can be
found in any single judge or panel of judges.” Precedent 9.

															Doubtless, past judicial decisions may, as they
always have, command “greater or less authority as precedents,
according to circumstances.” Lincoln Speech 401. But, like English
judges before us, we have long turned to familiar considerations to
guide our assessment of the weight due a past decision. So, for
example, as this Court has put it, the weight due a precedent may
depend on the quality of its reasoning, its consistency with
related decisions, its workability, and reliance interests that
have formed around it. See Ramos , 590 U. S., at 106.
The first factor recognizes that the primary power of any precedent
lies in its power to persuade—and poorly reasoned decisions may not
provide reliable evidence of the law’s meaning. The second factor
reflects the fact that a precedent is more likely to be correct and
worthy of respect when it reflects the time-tested wisdom of
generations than when it sits “unmoored” from surrounding law. Ibid. The remaining factors, like workability and reliance,
do not often supply reason enough on their own to abide a flawed
decision, for almost any past decision is likely to benefit some
group eager to keep things as they are and content with how things
work. See, e.g. , id ., at 108. But these factors can
sometimes serve functions similar to the others, by pointing to
clues that may suggest a past decision is right in ways not
immediately obvious to the individual judge.

															When asking whether to follow or depart from a
precedent, some judges deploy adverbs. They speak of whether or not
a precedent qualifies as “demonstrably erroneous,” Gamble v. United States , 587 U.S. 678, 711 (2019) (Thomas, J.,
concurring), or “egregiously wrong,” Ramos , 590 U. S.,
at 121 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring in part). But the emphasis the
adverb imparts is not meant for dramatic effect. It seeks to serve
instead as a reminder of a more substantive lesson. The lesson
that, in assessing the weight due a past decision, a judge is not
to be guided by his own impression alone, but must self-consciously
test his views against those who have come before, open to the
possibility that a precedent might be correct in ways not initially
apparent to him. Third , it would be a mistake to read
judicial opinions like statutes. Adopted through a robust and
democratic process, statutes often apply in all their particulars
to all persons. By contrast, when judges reach a decision in our
adversarial system, they render a judgment based only on the
factual record and legal arguments the parties at hand have chosen
to develop. A later court assessing a past decision must therefore
appreciate the possibility that different facts and different legal
arguments may dictate a different outcome. They must appreciate,
too, that, like anyone else, judges are “innately digressive,” and
their opinions may sometimes offer stray asides about a wider topic
that may sound nearly like legislative commands. Duxbury 4. Often,
enterprising counsel seek to exploit such statements to maximum
effect. See id ., at 25. But while these digressions may
sometimes contain valuable counsel, they remain “vapours and fumes
of law,” Bacon 478, and cannot “control the judgment in a
subsequent suit,” Cohens , 6 Wheat., at 399.

															These principles, too, have long guided this
Court and others. As Judge Easterbrook has put it, an “opinion is
not a comprehensive code; it is just an explanation for the Court’s
disposition. Judicial opinions must not be confused with statutes,
and general expressions must be read in light of the subject under
consideration.” United States v. Skoien , 614 F.3d
638, 640 (CA7 2010) (en banc); see also Reiter v. Sonotone Corp. , 442 U.S.
330 , 341 (1979) (stressing that an opinion is not “a statute,”
and its language should not “be parsed” as if it were); Nevada v. Hicks , 533 U.S.
353 , 372 (2001) (same). If stare decisis counsels
respect for the thinking of those who have come before, it also
counsels against doing an “injustice to [their] memory” by
overreliance on their every word. Steel , 1 Bl. H., at 53,
126 Eng. Rep., at 33. As judges, “[w]e neither expect nor hope that
our successors will comb” through our opinions, searching for
delphic answers to matters we never fully explored. Brown v. Davenport , 596 U.S. 118, 141 (2022). To proceed otherwise
risks “turn[ing] stare decisis from a tool of judicial
humility into one of judicial hubris.” Ibid. II

															Turning now directly to the question what stare decisis effect Chevron deference warrants, each
of these lessons seem to me to weigh firmly in favor of the course
the Court charts today: Lesson 1, because Chevron deference
contravenes the law Congress prescribed in the Administrative
Procedure Act. Lesson 2, because Chevron deference runs
against mainstream currents in our law regarding the separation of
powers, due process, and centuries-old interpretive rules that
fortify those constitutional commitments. And Lesson 3, because to
hold otherwise would effectively require us to endow stray
statements in Chevron with the authority of statutory
language, all while ignoring more considered language in that same
decision and the teachings of experience.

															A

															Start with Lesson 1. The Administrative
Procedure Act of 1946 (APA) directs a “reviewing court” to “decide
all relevant questions of law” and “interpret” relevant
“constitutional and statutory provisions.”
5 U. S. C. §706. When applying Chevron deference, reviewing courts do not interpret all relevant statutory
provisions and decide all relevant questions of law. Instead,
judges abdicate a large measure of that responsibility in favor of
agency officials. Their interpretations of “ambiguous” laws control
even when those interpretations are at odds with the fairest
reading of the law an independent “reviewing court” can muster.
Agency officials, too, may change their minds about the law’s
meaning at any time, even when Congress has not amended the
relevant statutory language in any way. National Cable &
Telecommunications Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services , 545 U.S.
967 , 982–983 (2005). And those officials may even disagree with
and effectively overrule not only their own past interpretations of
a law but a court’s past interpretation as well. Ibid. None
of that is consistent with the APA’s clear mandate.

															The hard fact is Chevron “did not even
bother to cite” the APA, let alone seek to apply its terms. United States v. Mead Corp. , 533
U.S. 218 , 241 (2001) (Scalia, J., dissenting). Instead, as even
its most ardent defenders have conceded, Chevron deference
rests upon a “ fictionalized statement of legislative
desire,” namely, a judicial supposition that Congress implicitly
wishes judges to defer to executive agencies’ interpretations of
the law even when it has said nothing of the kind. D. Barron &
E. Kagan, Chevron’s Nondelegation Doctrine, 2001 S. Ct. Rev.
201, 212 (Kagan) (emphasis added). As proponents see it, that
fiction represents a “policy judgmen[t] about what . . .
make[s] for good government.” Ibid. [ 2 ] But in our democracy unelected judges possess no
authority to elevate their own fictions over the laws adopted by
the Nation’s elected representatives. Some might think the legal
directive Congress provided in the APA unwise; some might think a
different arrangement preferable. See, e.g. , post , at
9–11 (Kagan, J., dissenting). But it is Congress’s view of “good
government,” not ours, that controls.

															Much more could be said about Chevron ’s
inconsistency with the APA. But I have said it in the past. See Buffington v. McDonough , 598 U. S. ___, ___–___
(2022) (opinion dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op., at
5–6); Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch , 834 F.3d 1142,
1151–1153 (CA10 2016) (concurring opinion). And the Court makes
many of the same points at length today. See ante , at 18–22.
For present purposes, the short of it is that continuing to abide Chevron deference would require us to transgress the first
lesson of stare decisis —the humility required of judges to
recognize that our decisions must yield to the laws adopted by the
people’s elected representatives.[ 3 ]

															B

															Lesson 2 cannot rescue Chevron deference. If stare decisis calls for judicial humility in
the face of the written law, it also cautions us to test our
present conclusions carefully against the work of our predecessors.
At the same time and as we have seen, this second form of humility
counsels us to remember that precedents that have won the
endorsement of judges across many generations, demonstrated
coherence with our broader law, and weathered the tests of time and
experience are entitled to greater consideration than those that
have not. See Part I, supra . Viewed by each of these lights,
the case for Chevron deference only grows weaker still.

															1

															Start with a look to how our predecessors
traditionally understood the judicial role in disputes over a law’s
meaning. From the Nation’s founding, they considered “[t]he
interpretation of the laws” in cases and controversies “the proper
and peculiar province of the courts.” The Federalist No. 78,
p. 467 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton). Perhaps the
Court’s most famous early decision reflected exactly that view.
There, Chief Justice Marshall declared it “emphatically the
province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law
is.” Marbury , 1 Cranch, at 177. For judges “have neither
FORCE nor WILL but merely judgment”—and an obligation to exercise
that judgment independently. The Federalist No. 78, at 465. No
matter how “disagreeable that duty may be,” this Court has said, a
judge “is not at liberty to surrender, or to waive it.” United
States v. Dickson , 15 Pet. 141, 162 (1841) (Story, J.).
This duty of independent judgment is perhaps “the defining
characteristi[c] of Article III judges.” Stern v. Marshall , 564 U.S.
462 , 483 (2011).

															To be sure, this Court has also long extended
“great respect” to the “contemporaneous” and consistent views of
the coordinate branches about the meaning of a statute’s terms. Edwards’ Lessee v. Darby , 12 Wheat. 206, 210 (1827);
see also McCulloch v. Maryland , 4 Wheat. 316, 401
(1819); Stuart v. Laird , 1 Cranch 299, 309
(1803).[ 4 ] But traditionally,
that did not mean a court had to “defer” to any “reasonable”
construction of an “ambiguous” law that an executive agency might
offer. It did not mean that the government could propound a
“reasonable” view of the law’s meaning one day, a different one the
next, and bind the judiciary always to its latest word. Nor did it
mean the executive could displace a pre-existing judicial
construction of a statute’s terms, replace it with its own, and
effectively overrule a judicial precedent in the process. Put
simply, this Court was “not bound” by any and all reasonable
“administrative construction[s]” of ambiguous statutes when
resolving cases and controversies. Burnet v. Chicago
Portrait Co. , 285 U.S.
1 , 16 (1932). While the executive’s consistent and
contemporaneous views warranted respect, they “by no means
control[led] the action or the opinion of this court in expounding
the law with reference to the rights of parties litigant before
them.” Irvine v. Marshall , 20 How. 558, 567 (1858);
see also A. Bamzai, The Origins of Judicial Deference to Executive
Interpretation, 126 Yale L. J. 908, 987 (2017).

															Sensing how jarringly inconsistent Chevron is with this Court’s many longstanding precedents
discussing the nature of the judicial role in disputes over the
law’s meaning, the government and dissent struggle for a response.
The best they can muster is a handful of cases from the early 1940s
in which, they say, this Court first “put [deference] principles
into action.” Post , at 21 (Kagan, J., dissenting). And,
admittedly, for a period this Court toyed with a form of deference
akin to Chevron , at least for so-called mixed questions of
law and fact. See, e.g. , Gray v. Powell , 314 U.S.
402 , 411–412 (1941); NLRB v. Hearst Publications,
Inc. , 322 U.S.
111 , 131 (1944). But, as the Court details, even that limited
experiment did not last. See ante , at 10–12 . Justice
Roberts, in his Gray dissent, decried these decisions for
“abdicat[ing our] function as a court of review” and “complete[ly]
revers[ing] . . . the normal and usual method of
construing a statute.” 314 U. S., at 420–421. And just a few
years later, in Skidmore v. Swift & Co. , 323 U.S.
134 (1944), the Court returned to its time-worn path.

															Echoing themes that had run throughout our law
from its start, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote for the Court in Skidmore . There, he said, courts may extend respectful
consideration to another branch’s interpretation of the law, but
the weight due those interpretations must always “depend upon
the[ir] thoroughness . . . , the validity of [their]
reasoning, [their] consistency with earlier and later
pronouncements, and all those factors which give [them] power to
persuade.” Id. , at 140. In another case the same year, and
again writing for the Court, Justice Jackson expressly rejected a
call for a judge-made doctrine of deference much like Chevron , offering that, “[i]f Congress had deemed it
necessary or even appropriate” for courts to “defe[r] to
administrative construction[,] . . . it would not have
been at a loss for words to say so.” Davies Warehouse Co. v. Bowles , 321 U.S.
144 , 156 (1944).

															To the extent proper respect for precedent
demands, as it always has, special respect for longstanding and
mainstream decisions, Chevron scores badly. It represented
not a continuation of a long line of decisions but a break from
them. Worse, it did not merely depart from our precedents. More
nearly, Chevron defied them.

															2

															Consider next how uneasily Chevron deference sits alongside so many other settled aspects of our law.
Having witnessed first-hand King George’s efforts to gain influence
and control over colonial judges, see Declaration of Independence ¶
11, the framers made a considered judgment to build judicial
independence into the Constitution’s design. They vested the
judicial power in decisionmakers with life tenure. Art. III,
§1. They placed the judicial salary beyond political control during
a judge’s tenure. Ibid. And they rejected any proposal that
would subject judicial decisions to review by political actors. The
Federalist No. 81, at 482; United States v. Hansen ,
599 U.S. 762, 786–791 (2023) (Thomas, J., concurring). All of this
served to ensure the same thing: “A fair trial in a fair tribunal.” In re Murchison , 349 U.S.
133 , 136 (1955). One in which impartial judges, not those
currently wielding power in the political branches, would “say what
the law is” in cases coming to court. Marbury , 1 Cranch, at
177. Chevron deference undermines all that. It
precludes courts from exercising the judicial power vested in them
by Article III to say what the law is. It forces judges to abandon
the best reading of the law in favor of views of those presently
holding the reins of the Executive Branch. It requires judges to
change, and change again, their interpretations of the law as and
when the government demands. And that transfer of power has exactly
the sort of consequences one might expect. Rather than insulate
adjudication from power and politics to ensure a fair hearing
“without respect to persons” as the federal judicial oath demands,
28 U. S. C. §453, Chevron deference requires
courts to “place a finger on the scales of justice in favor of the
most powerful of litigants, the federal government.” Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 9). Along
the way, Chevron deference guarantees “systematic bias” in
favor of whichever political party currently holds the levers of
executive power. P. Hamburger, Chevron Bias, 84 Geo. Wash.
L. Rev. 1187, 1212 (2016). Chevron deference undermines other
aspects of our settled law, too. In this country, we often boast
that the Constitution’s promise of due process of law, see Amdts.
5, 14, means that “ ‘no man can be a judge in his own
case.’ ” Williams v. Pennsylvania , 579 U.S. 1,
8–9 (2016); Calder v. Bull , 3 Dall. 386, 388 (1798)
(opinion of Chase, J.). That principle, of course, has even deeper
roots, tracing far back into the common law where it was known by
the Latin maxim nemo iudex in causa sua . See 1 E. Coke,
Institutes of the Laws of England §212, *141a. Yet, under the Chevron regime, all that means little, for executive
agencies may effectively judge the scope of their own lawful
powers. See, e.g., Arlington v. FCC , 569 U.S.
290 , 296–297 (2013).

															Traditionally, as well, courts have sought to
construe statutes as a reasonable reader would “when the law was
made.” Blackstone 59; see United States v. Fisher , 2
Cranch 358, 386 (1805). Today, some call this “textualism.” But
really it’s a very old idea, one that constrains judges to a
lawfinding rather than lawmaking role by focusing their work on the
statutory text, its linguistic context, and various canons of
construction. In that way, textualism serves as an essential
guardian of the due process promise of fair notice. If a judge
could discard an old meaning and assign a new one to a law’s terms,
all without any legislative revision, how could people ever be sure
of the rules that bind them? New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira , 586 U.S. 105, 113 (2019). Were the rules
otherwise, Blackstone warned, the people would be rendered “slaves
to their magistrates.” 4 Blackstone 371.

															Yet, replace “magistrates” with “bureaucrats,”
and Blackstone’s fear becomes reality when courts employ Chevron deference. Whenever we confront an ambiguity in the
law, judges do not seek to resolve it impartially according to the
best evidence of the law’s original meaning. Instead, we resort to
a far cruder heuristic: “The reasonable bureaucrat always wins.”
And because the reasonable bureaucrat may change his mind
year-to-year and election-to-election, the people can never know
with certainty what new “interpretations” might be used against
them. This “fluid” approach to statutory interpretation is “as much
a trap for the innocent as the ancient laws of Caligula,” which
were posted so high up on the walls and in print so small that
ordinary people could never be sure what they required. United
States v. Cardiff , 344 U.S.
174 , 176 (1952).

															The ancient rule of lenity is still another of Chevron ’s victims. Since the founding, American courts have
construed ambiguities in penal laws against the government and with
lenity toward affected persons. Wooden v. United States , 595 U.S. 360, 388–390 (2022) (Gorsuch, J.,
concurring in judgment). That principle upholds due process by
safeguarding individual liberty in the face of ambiguous laws. Ibid. And it fortifies the separation of powers by keeping
the power of punishment firmly “ ‘in the legislative, not in
the judicial department.’ ” Id. , at 391 (quoting United States v. Wiltberger , 5 Wheat. 76, 95 (1820)).
But power begets power. And pressing Chevron deference as
far as it can go, the government has sometimes managed to leverage
“ambiguities” in the written law to penalize conduct Congress never
clearly proscribed. Compare Guedes v. ATF , 920 F.3d
1, 27–28, 31 (CADC 2019), with Garland v. Cargill ,
602 U.S. 604 (2024).

															In all these ways, Chevron ’s fiction has
led us to a strange place. One where authorities long thought
reserved for Article III are transferred to Article II, where the
scales of justice are tilted systematically in favor of the most
powerful, where legal demands can change with every election even
though the laws do not, and where the people are left to guess
about their legal rights and responsibilities. So much tension with
so many foundational features of our legal order is surely one more
sign that we have “taken a wrong turn along the way.” Kisor v. Wilkie , 588 U.S. 558, 607 (2019) (Gorsuch, J., concurring
in judgment).[ 5 ]

															3

															Finally, consider workability and reliance.
If, as I have sought to suggest, these factors may sometimes serve
as useful proxies for the question whether a precedent comports
with the historic tide of judicial practice or represents an
aberrational mistake, see Part I–C, supra , they certainly do
here.

															Take Chevron ’s “workability.” Throughout
its short life, this Court has been forced to supplement and revise Chevron so many times that no one can agree on how many
“steps” it requires, nor even what each of those “steps” entails.
Some suggest that the analysis begins with “step zero” (perhaps
itself a tell), an innovation that traces to United States v. Mead Corp. , 533 U.S.
218 . Mead held that, before even considering whether Chevron applies, a court must determine whether Congress
meant to delegate to the agency authority to interpret the law in a
given field. 533 U. S., at 226–227. But that exercise faces an
immediate challenge: Because Chevron depends on a judicially
implied, rather than a legislatively expressed, delegation of
interpretive authority to an executive agency, Part II–A, supra , when should the fiction apply and when not? Mead fashioned a multifactor test for judges to use. 533
U. S., at 229–231. But that test has proved as indeterminate
in application as it was contrived in origin. Perhaps for these
reasons, perhaps for others, this Court has sometimes applied Mead and often ignored it. See Brand X , 545
U. S., at 1014, n. 8 (Scalia, J., dissenting).

															Things do not improve as we move up the Chevron ladder. At “step one,” a judge must defer to an
executive official’s interpretation when the statute at hand is
“ambiguous.” But even today, Chevron ’s principal
beneficiary—the federal government—still cannot say when a statute
is sufficiently ambiguous to trigger deference. See, e.g. ,
Tr. of Oral Arg. in American Hospital Assn. v. Becerra , O. T. 2021, No. 20–1114, pp. 71–72.
Perhaps thanks to this particular confusion, the search for
ambiguity has devolved into a sort of Snark hunt: Some judges claim
to spot it almost everywhere, while other equally fine judges claim
never to have seen it. Compare L. Silberman, Chevron —The
Intersection of Law & Policy, 58 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 821,
826 (1990), with R. Kethledge, Ambiguities and Agency Cases:
Reflections After (Almost) Ten Years on the Bench, 70 Vand.
L. Rev. En Banc 315, 323 (2017).

															Nor do courts agree when it comes to “step two.”
There, a judge must assess whether an executive agency’s
interpretation of an ambiguous statute is “reasonable.” But what
does that inquiry demand? Some courts engage in a comparatively
searching review; others almost reflexively defer to an agency’s
views. Here again, courts have pursued “wildly different”
approaches and reached wildly different conclusions in similar
cases. See B. Kavanaugh, Fixing Statutory Interpretation, 129 Harv.
L. Rev. 2118, 2152 (2016) (Kavanaugh).

															Today’s cases exemplify some of these problems.
We have before us two circuit decisions, three opinions, and at
least as many interpretive options on the Chevron menu. On
the one hand, we have the D. C. Circuit majority, which deemed the
Magnuson-Stevens Act “ambiguous” and upheld the agency’s regulation
as “ ‘permissible.’ ” 45 F. 4th 359, 365 (2022). On
the other hand, we have the D. C. Circuit dissent, which argues the
statute is “unambiguou[s]” and that it plainly forecloses the
agency’s new rule. Id. , at 372 (opinion of Walker, J.). And
on yet a third hand, we have the First Circuit, which claimed to
have identified “clear textual support” for the regulation, yet
refused to say whether it would “classify [its] conclusion as a
product of Chevron step one or step two.” 62 F. 4th
621, 631, 634 (2023). As these cases illustrate, Chevron has
turned statutory interpretation into a game of bingo under
blindfold, with parties guessing at how many boxes there are and
which one their case might ultimately fall in.

															Turn now from workability to reliance. Far from
engendering reliance interests, the whole point of Chevron deference is to upset them. Under Chevron , executive
officials can replace one “reasonable” interpretation with another
at any time, all without any change in the law itself. The result:
Affected individuals “can never be sure of their legal rights and
duties.” Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at
12).

															How bad is the problem? Take just one example. Brand X concerned a law regulating broadband internet
services. There, the Court upheld an agency rule adopted by the
administration of President George W. Bush because it was premised
on a “reasonable” interpretation of the statute. Later, President
Barack Obama’s administration rescinded the rule and replaced it
with another. Later still, during President Donald J. Trump’s
administration, officials replaced that rule with a different one,
all before President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s administration declared
its intention to reverse course for yet a fourth time. See
Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet, 88 Fed. Reg. 76048
(2023); Brand X , 545 U. S., at 981–982. Each time, the
government claimed its new rule was just as “reasonable” as the
last. Rather than promoting reliance by fixing the meaning of the
law, Chevron deference engenders constant uncertainty and
convulsive change even when the statute at issue itself remains
unchanged.

															Nor are these antireliance harms distributed
equally. Sophisticated entities and their lawyers may be able to
keep pace with rule changes affecting their rights and
responsibilities. They may be able to lobby for new
“ ‘reasonable’ ” agency interpretations and even capture
the agencies that issue them. Buffington , 598 U. S., at
___, ___ (slip op., at 8, 13). But ordinary people can do none of
those things. They are the ones who suffer the worst kind of
regulatory whiplash Chevron invites.

															Consider a couple of examples. Thomas
Buffington, a veteran of the U. S. Air Force, was injured in
the line of duty. For a time after he left the Air Force, the
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) paid disability benefits due
him by law. But later the government called on Mr. Buffington to
reenter active service. During that period, everyone agreed, the VA
could (as it did) suspend his disability payments. After he left
active service for a second time, however, the VA turned his
patriotism against him. By law, Congress permitted the VA to
suspend disability pay only “for any period for which [a
servicemember] receives active service pay.” 38 U. S. C.
§5304(c). But the VA had adopted a self-serving regulation
requiring veterans to file a form asking for the resumption of
their disability pay after a second (or subsequent) stint in active
service. 38 CFR §3.654(b)(2) (2021). Unaware of the regulation, Mr.
Buffington failed to reapply immediately. When he finally figured
out what had happened and reapplied, the VA agreed to resume
payments going forward but refused to give Mr. Buffington all of
the past disability payments it had withheld. Buffington ,
598 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 1–4).

															Mr. Buffington challenged the agency’s action as
inconsistent with Congress’s direction that the VA may suspend
disability payments only for those periods when a veteran returns
to active service. But armed with Chevron , the agency
defeated Mr. Buffington’s claim. Maybe the self-serving regulation
the VA cited as justification for its action was not premised on
the best reading of the law, courts said, but it represented a
“ ‘permissible’ ” one. 598 U. S., at ___ (slip op.,
at 7). In that way, the Executive Branch was able to evade
Congress’s promises to someone who took the field repeatedly in the
Nation’s defense.

															In another case, one which I heard as a court of
appeals judge, De Niz Robles v. Lynch , 803 F.3d 1165
(CA10 2015), the Board of Immigration Appeals invoked Chevron to overrule a judicial precedent on which many
immigrants had relied, see In re Briones , 24 I. &
N. Dec. 355, 370 (BIA 2007) (purporting to overrule Padilla–Caldera v. Gonzales , 426 F.3d 1294 (CA10 2005)). The agency then sought to apply its
new interpretation retroactively to punish those
immigrants—including Alfonzo De Niz Robles, who had relied on that
judicial precedent as authority to remain in this country with his
U. S. wife and four children. See 803 F. 3d, at
1168–1169. Our court ruled that this retrospective application of
the BIA’s new interpretation of the law violated Mr. De Niz
Robles’s due process rights. Id. , at 1172. But as a lower
court, we could treat only the symptom, not the disease. So Chevron permitted the agency going forward to overrule a
judicial decision about the best reading of the law with its own
different “reasonable” one and in that way deny relief to countless
future immigrants.

															Those are just two stories among so many that
federal judges could tell (and have told) about what Chevron deference has meant for ordinary people interacting with the
federal government. See, e.g. , Lambert v. Saul , 980 F.3d 1266, 1268–1276 (CA9 2020); Valent v. Commissioner of Social Security , 918 F.3d 516,
525–527 (CA6 2019) (Kethledge, J., dissenting); Gonzalez v. United States Atty. Gen. , 820 F.3d 399, 402–405 (CA11 2016)
( per curiam ).

															What does the federal government have to say
about this? It acknowledges that Chevron sits as a heavy
weight on the scale in favor of the government, “oppositional” to
many “categories of individuals.” Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 22–1219,
p. 133 (Relentless Tr.). But, according to the government, Chevron deference is too important an innovation to undo. In
its brief reign, the government says, it has become a
“fundamenta[l] . . . ground rul[e] for how all three
branches of the government are operating together.” Relentless Tr.
102. But, in truth, the Constitution, the APA, and our longstanding
precedents set those ground rules some time ago. And under them,
agencies cannot invoke a judge-made fiction to unsettle our
Nation’s promise to individuals that they are entitled to make
their arguments about the law’s demands on them in a fair hearing,
one in which they stand on equal footing with the government before
an independent judge.

															C

															How could a Court, guided for 200 years by
Chief Justice Marshall’s example, come to embrace a
counter- Marbury revolution, one at war with the APA, time
honored precedents, and so much surrounding law? To answer these
questions, turn to Lesson 3 and witness the temptation to endow a
stray passage in a judicial decision with extraordinary authority.
Call it “power quoting.” Chevron was an unlikely place for a
revolution to begin. The case concerned the Clean Air Act’s
requirement that States regulate “stationary sources” of air
pollution in their borders. See
42 U. S. C. §7401 et seq . At the
time, it was an open question whether entire industrial plants or
their constituent polluting parts counted as “stationary sources.”
The Environmental Protection Agency had defined entire plants as
sources, an approach that allowed companies to replace individual
plant parts without automatically triggering the permitting
requirements that apply to new sources. Chevron ,
467 U. S., at 840.

															This Court upheld the EPA’s definition as
consistent with the governing statute. Id ., at 866. The
decision, issued by a bare quorum of the Court, without concurrence
or dissent, purported to apply “well-settled principles.” Id ., at 845. “If a court, employing traditional tools of
statutory construction, ascertains that Congress had an intention
on the precise question at issue,” Chevron provided, then
“that intention is the law and must be given effect.” Id .,
at 843, n. 9. Many of the cases Chevron cited to
support its judgment stood for the traditional proposition that
courts afford respectful consideration, not deference, to executive
interpretations of the law. See, e.g. , Burnet , 285
U. S., at 16; United States v. Moore , 95 U.S.
760 , 763 (1878). And the decision’s sole citation to legal
scholarship was to Roscoe Pound, who long championed de novo judicial review. 467 U. S., at 843, n. 10; see R. Pound,
The Place of the Judiciary in a Democratic Polity, 27
A. B. A. J. 133, 136–137 (1941).

															At the same time, of course, the opinion
contained bits and pieces that spoke differently. The decision also
said that, “if [a] statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to
[a] specific issue, the question for the court is whether the
agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the
statute.” 467 U. S., at 843. But it seems the government
didn’t advance this formulation in its brief, so there was no
adversarial engagement on it. T. Merrill, The Story of Chevron : The Making of an Accidental Landmark, 66 Admin.
L. Rev. 253, 268 (2014) (Merrill). As we have seen, too, the
Court did not pause to consider (or even mention) the APA. See Part
II–A, supra. It did not discuss contrary precedents issued
by the Court since the founding, let alone purport to overrule any
of them. See Part II–B–1, supra. Nor did the Court seek to
address how its novel rule of deference might be squared with so
much surrounding law. See Part II–B–2, supra . As even its
defenders have acknowledged, “ Chevron barely bothered to
justify its rule of deference, and the few brief passages on this
matter pointed in disparate directions.” Kagan 212–213. “[T]he
quality of the reasoning,” they acknowledge, “was not high,” C.
Sunstein, Chevron as Law, 107 Geo. L. J. 1613, 1669
(2019).

															If Chevron meant to usher in a revolution
in how judges interpret laws, no one appears to have realized it at
the time. Chevron ’s author, Justice Stevens, characterized
the decision as a “simpl[e] . . . restatement of existing
law, nothing more or less.” Merrill 255, 275. In the “19 argued
cases” in the following Term “that presented some kind of question
about whether the Court should defer to an agency interpretation of
statutory law,” this Court cited Chevron just once. Merrill
276. By some accounts, the decision seemed “destined to obscurity.” Ibid .

															It was only three years later when Justice
Scalia wrote a concurrence that a revolution began to take shape. Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 8). There,
he argued for a new rule requiring courts to defer to executive
agency interpretations of the law whenever a “ ‘statute is
silent or ambiguous.’ ” NLRB v. Food &
Commercial Workers , 484 U.S.
112 , 133–134 (1987) (opinion of Scalia, J.). Eventually, a
majority of the Court followed his lead. Buffington , 598
U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 8). But from the start, Justice
Scalia made no secret about the scope of his ambitions. See
Judicial Deference to Administrative Interpretations of Law, 1989
Duke L. J. 511, 521 (1989) (Scalia). The rule he advocated for
represented such a sharp break from prior practice, he explained,
that many judges of his day didn’t yet “understand” the “old
criteria” were “no longer relevant.” Ibid . Still, he said,
overthrowing the past was worth it because a new deferential rule
would be “easier to follow.” Ibid. Events proved otherwise. As the years wore on
and the Court’s new and aggressive reading of Chevron gradually exposed itself as unworkable, unfair, and at odds with
our separation of powers, Justice Scalia could have doubled down on
the project. But he didn’t. He appreciated that stare
decisis is not a rule of “if I thought it yesterday, I must
think it tomorrow.” And rather than cling to the pride of personal
precedent, the Justice began to express doubts over the very
project that he had worked to build. See Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Assn. , 575 U.S.
92 , 109–110 (2015) (opinion concurring in judgment); cf. Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center , 568 U.S.
597 , 617–618, 621 (2013) (opinion concurring in part and
dissenting in part). If Chevron ’s ascent is a testament to
the Justice’s ingenuity, its demise is an even greater tribute to
his humility.[ 6 ]

															Justice Scalia was not alone in his
reconsideration. After years spent laboring under Chevron ,
trying to make sense of it and make it work, Member after Member of
this Court came to question the project. See, e.g. , Pereira v. Sessions , 585 U.S. 198, 219–221 (2018)
(Kennedy, J., concurring); Michigan v. EPA , 576 U.S.
743 , 760–764 (2015) (Thomas, J., concurring); Kisor , 588
U. S., at 591 (Roberts, C. J., concurring in part); Gutierrez-Brizuela , 834 F. 3d, at 1153; Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 14–15);
Kavanaugh 2150–2154. Ultimately, the Court gave up. Despite
repeated invitations, it has not applied Chevron deference
since 2016. Relentless Tr. 81; App. to Brief for Respondents in No.
22–1219, p. 68a. So an experiment that began only in the
mid-1980s effectively ended eight years ago. Along the way, an
unusually large number of federal appellate judges voiced their own
thoughtful and extensive criticisms of Chevron . Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 14–15)
(collecting examples). A number of state courts did, too, refusing
to import Chevron deference into their own administrative
law jurisprudence. See 598 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at
15).

															Even if all that and everything else laid out
above is true, the government suggests we should retain Chevron deference because judges simply cannot live without
it; some statutes are just too “technical” for courts to interpret
“intelligently.” Post , at 9, 32 (dissenting opinion). But
that objection is no answer to Chevron ’s inconsistency with
Congress’s directions in the APA, so much surrounding law, or the
challenges its multistep regime have posed in practice. Nor does
history counsel such defeatism. Surely, it would be a mistake to
suggest our predecessors before Chevron ’s rise in the
mid-1980s were unable to make their way intelligently through
technical statutory disputes. Following their lead, over the past
eight years this Court has managed to resolve even highly complex
cases without Chevron deference, and done so even when the
government sought deference. Nor, as far as I am aware, did any
Member of the Court suggest Chevron deference was necessary
to an intelligent resolution of any of those matters.[ 7 ] If anything, by affording Chevron deference a period of repose before addressing whether it should be
retained, the Court has enabled its Members to test the propriety
of that precedent and reflect more deeply on how well it fits into
the broader architecture of our law. Others may see things
differently, see post , at 26–27 (dissenting opinion), but
the caution the Court has exhibited before overruling Chevron may illustrate one of the reasons why the current
Court has been slower to overrule precedents than some of its
predecessors, see Part I–C, supra .

															None of this, of course, discharges any Member
of this Court from the task of deciding for himself or herself
today whether Chevron deference itself warrants deference.
But when so many past and current judicial colleagues in this Court
and across the country tell us our doctrine is misguided, and when
we ourselves managed without Chevron for centuries and
manage to do so today, the humility at the core of stare
decisis compels us to pause and reflect carefully on the wisdom
embodied in that experience. And, in the end, to my mind the
lessons of experience counsel wisely against continued reliance on Chevron ’s stray and unconsidered digression. This Court’s
opinions fill over 500 volumes, and perhaps “some printed judicial
word may be found to support almost any plausible proposition.” R.
Jackson, Decisional Law and Stare Decisis, 30 A. B. A. J.
334 (1944). It is not for us to pick and choose passages we happen
to like and demand total obedience to them in perpetuity. That
would turn stare decisis from a doctrine of humility into a
tool for judicial opportunism. Brown , 596 U. S., at
141.

															III

															Proper respect for precedent helps “keep the
scale of justice even and steady,” by reinforcing decisional rules
consistent with the law upon which all can rely. 1 Blackstone 69.
But that respect does not require, nor does it readily tolerate, a
steadfast refusal to correct mistakes. As early as 1810, this Court
had already overruled one of its cases. See Hudson v. Guestier , 6 Cranch 281, 284 (overruling Rose v. Himely , 4 Cranch 241 (1808)). In recent years, the Court may
have overruled precedents less frequently than it did during the
Warren and Burger Courts. See Part I–C, supra . But the job
of reconsidering past decisions remains one every Member of this
Court faces from time to time.[ 8 ]

															Justice William O. Douglas served longer on this
Court than any other person in the Nation’s history. During his
tenure, he observed how a new colleague might be inclined initially
to “revere” every word written in an opinion issued before he
arrived. W. Douglas, Stare Decisis, 49 Colum. L. Rev. 735, 736
(1949). But, over time, Justice Douglas reflected, his new
colleague would “remembe[r] . . . that it is the
Constitution which he swore to support and defend, not the gloss
which his predecessors may have put on it.” Ibid. And “[s]o
he [would] com[e] to formulate his own views, rejecting some
earlier ones as false and embracing others.” Ibid. This
process of reexamination, Justice Douglas explained, is a
“necessary consequence of our system” in which each judge takes an
oath—both “personal” and binding—to discern the law’s meaning for
himself and apply it faithfully in the cases that come before him. Id. , at 736–737.

															Justice Douglas saw, too, how appeals to
precedent could be overstated and sometimes even overwrought.
Judges, he reflected, would sometimes first issue “new and
startling decision[s],” and then later spin around and “acquire an
acute conservatism” in their aggressive defense of “their new status quo .” Id ., at 737. In that way, even the most
novel and unlikely decisions became “coveted anchorage[s],”
defended heatedly, if ironically, under the banner of “ stare
decisis .” Ibid. ; see also Edwards v. Vannoy , 593 U.S. 255, 294, n. 7 (2021) (Gorsuch, J.,
concurring).

															That is Chevron ’s story: A revolution
masquerading as the status quo. And the defense of it follows the
same course Justice Douglas described. Though our dissenting
colleagues have not hesitated to question other precedents in the
past, they today manifest what Justice Douglas called an “acute
conservatism” for Chevron ’s “startling” development,
insisting that if this “coveted anchorage” is abandoned the heavens
will fall. But the Nation managed to live with busy executive
agencies of all sorts long before the Chevron revolution
began to take shape in the mid-1980s. And all today’s decision
means is that, going forward, federal courts will do exactly as
this Court has since 2016, exactly as it did before the mid-1980s,
and exactly as it had done since the founding: resolve cases and
controversies without any systemic bias in the government’s
favor.

															Proper respect for precedent does not begin to
suggest otherwise. Instead, it counsels respect for the written
law, adherence to consistent teachings over aberrations, and
resistance to the temptation of treating our own stray remarks as
if they were statutes. And each of those lessons points toward the
same conclusion today: Chevron deference is inconsistent
with the directions Congress gave us in the APA. It represents a
grave anomaly when viewed against the sweep of historic judicial
practice. The decision undermines core rule-of-law values ranging
from the promise of fair notice to the promise of a fair hearing.
Even on its own terms, it has proved unworkable and operated to
undermine rather than advance reliance interests, often to the
detriment of ordinary Americans. And from the start, the whole
project has relied on the overaggressive use of snippets and stray
remarks from an opinion that carried mixed messages. Stare
decisis ’s true lesson today is not that we are bound to respect Chevron ’s “startling development,” but bound to inter
it. Notes 1 For relevant databases of
decisions, see Congressional Research Service, Table of Supreme
Court Decisions Overruled by Subsequent Decisions, Constitution
Annotated,
https://constitution.congress.gov/resources/decisions-overruled/;
see also H. Spaeth et al., 2023 Supreme Court Database,
http://supremecourtdatabase.org. 2 See also A. Scalia,
Judicial Deference to Administrative Interpretations of Law, 1989
Duke L. J. 511, 516–517 (1989) (describing Chevron ’s
theory that Congress “delegat[ed]” interpretive authority to
agencies as “fictional”); S. Breyer, Judicial Review of Questions
of Law and Policy, 38 Admin. L. Rev. 363, 370 (1986) (describing
the notion that there exists a “ ‘legislative intent to
delegate the law-interpreting function’ as a kind of legal
fiction”). 3 The dissent suggests that
we need not take the APA’s directions quite so seriously because
the “finest administrative law scholars” from Harvard claim to see
in them some wiggle room. Post , at 18 (opinion of Kagan,
J.). But nothing in the APA commands deference to the views of
professors any more than it does the government. Nor is the
dissent’s list of Harvard’s finest administrative law scholars
entirely complete. See S. Breyer et al., Administrative Law and
Regulatory Policy 288 (7th ed. 2011) (acknowledging that Chevron deference “seems in conflict with . . .
the apparently contrary language of 706”); Kagan 212 (likewise
acknowledging Chevron deference rests upon a “fictionalized
statement of legislative desire”). 4 Accord, National Lead
Co. v. United States , 252 U.S.
140 , 145–146 (1920) (affording “great weight” to a
“contemporaneous construction” by the executive that had “been long
continued”); Jacobs v. Prichard , 223 U.S.
200 , 214 (1912) (“find[ing] no ambiguity in the act” but also
finding “strength” for the Court’s interpretation in the
executive’s “immediate and continued construction of the act”); Schell’s Executors v. Fauché , 138
U.S. 562 , 572 (1891) (treating as “controlling” a
“contemporaneous construction” of a law endorsed “not only [by] the
courts but [also by] the departments”). 5 The dissent suggests that Chevron deference bears at least something in common with
surrounding law because it resembles a presumption or traditional
canon of construction, and both “are common.” Post , at 8,
n. 1, 28–29 (opinion of Kagan, J.). But even that thin reed
wavers at a glance. Many of the presumptions and interpretive
canons the dissent cites—including lenity, contra
proferentem , and others besides—“ ‘embod[y]
. . . legal doctrine[s] centuries older than our
Republic.’ ” Opati v. Republic of Sudan , 590
U.S. 418, 425 (2020). Chevron deference can make no such
boast. Many of the presumptions and canons the dissent cites also
serve the Constitution, protecting the lines of authority it draws.
Take just two examples: The federalism canon tells courts to
presume federal statutes do not preempt state laws because of the
sovereignty States enjoy under the Constitution. Bond v. United States , 572 U.S.
844 , 858 (2014). The presumption against retroactivity serves
as guardian of the Constitution’s promise of due process and its
ban on ex post facto laws, Landgraf v. USI Film
Products , 511 U.S.
244 , 265 (1994). Once more, however, Chevron deference
can make no similar claim. Rather than serve the Constitution’s
usual rule that litigants are entitled to have an independent judge
interpret disputed legal terms, Chevron deference works to
undermine that promise. As explored above, too, Chevron deference sits in tension with many traditional legal presumptions
and interpretive principles, representing nearly the inverse of the rules of lenity, nemo iudex , and contra
proferentem . 6 It should be recalled
that, when Justice Scalia launched the Chevron revolution,
there were many judges who “abhor[red] . . . ‘plain
meaning’ ” and preferred instead to elevate “legislative
history” and their own curated accounts of a law’s “purpose[s]”
over enacted statutory text. Scalia 515, 521. Chevron , he
predicted, would provide a new guardrail against that practice.
Scalia 515, 521 . As the Justice’s later writings show, he
had the right diagnosis, just the wrong cure. The answer for judges
eliding statutory terms is not deference to agencies that may seek
to do the same, but a demand that all return to a more faithful
adherence to the written law. That was, of course, another project
Justice Scalia championed. And as we like to say, “we’re all
textualists now.” 7 See, e.g., Becerra v. Empire Health Foundation, for Valley Hospital
Medical Center , 597 U.S. 424, 434 (2022) (resolving intricate
Medicare dispute by reference solely to “text,” “context,” and
“structure”); see also Sackett v. EPA , 598 U.S. 651
(2023) (same in a complex Clean Water Act dispute); Johnson v. Guzman Chavez , 594 U.S. 523 (2021) (same in technical
immigration case). 8 Today’s dissenters are no
exceptions. They have voted to overrule precedents that they
consider “wrong,” Hurst v. Florida , 577 U.S.
92 , 101 (2016) (opinion for the Court by Sotomayor, J., joined
by, inter alios , Kagan, J.); Obergefell v. Hodges , 576 U.S.
644 , 665, 675 (2015) (opinion for the Court, joined by, inter alios , Sotomayor and Kagan, JJ.); that conflict with
the Constitution’s “original meaning,” Alleyne v. United
States , 570 U.S.
99 , 118 (2013) (Sotomayor, J., joined by, inter alias ,
Kagan, J., concurring); and that have proved “unworkable,” Johnson v. United States , 576
U.S. 591 , 605 (2015) (opinion for the Court, joined by, inter alios , Sotomayor and Kagan, JJ.); see also Erlinger v. United States , 602 U. S. ___,
___ (2024) (Jackson, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 1) (arguing Apprendi v. New Jersey , 530 U.S.
466 (2000), and the many cases applying it were all “wrongly
decided”). SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

															_________________

															Nos. 22–451 and 22–1219

															_________________

															LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES, et al.,
PETITIONERS

															22–451 v. GINA RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF COMMERCE,
et al.

															on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the district of columbia circuit

															RELENTLESS, INC., et al.,
PETITIONERS

															22–1219 v. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, et al.

															on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the first circuit

															[June 28, 2024]

															Justice Kagan, with whom Justice Sotomayor and
Justice Jackson join,[ 1 ]*
dissenting.

															For 40 years, Chevron U. S. A.
Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. , 467 U.S.
837 (1984), has served as a cornerstone of administrative law,
allocating responsibility for statutory construction between courts
and agencies. Under Chevron , a court uses all its normal
interpretive tools to determine whether Congress has spoken to an
issue. If the court finds Congress has done so, that is the end of
the matter; the agency’s views make no difference. But if the court
finds, at the end of its interpretive work, that Congress has left
an ambiguity or gap, then a choice must be made. Who should give
content to a statute when Congress’s instructions have run out?
Should it be a court? Or should it be the agency Congress has
charged with administering the statute? The answer Chevron gives is that it should usually be the agency, within the bounds of
reasonableness. That rule has formed the backdrop against which
Congress, courts, and agencies—as well as regulated parties and the
public—all have operated for decades. It has been applied in
thousands of judicial decisions. It has become part of the warp and
woof of modern government, supporting regulatory efforts of all
kinds—to name a few, keeping air and water clean, food and drugs
safe, and financial markets honest.

															And the rule is right. This Court has long
understood Chevron deference to reflect what Congress would
want, and so to be rooted in a presumption of legislative intent.
Congress knows that it does not—in fact cannot—write perfectly
complete regulatory statutes. It knows that those statutes will
inevitably contain ambiguities that some other actor will have to
resolve, and gaps that some other actor will have to fill. And it
would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a
court. Some interpretive issues arising in the regulatory context
involve scientific or technical subject matter. Agencies have
expertise in those areas; courts do not. Some demand a detailed
understanding of complex and interdependent regulatory programs.
Agencies know those programs inside-out; again, courts do not. And
some present policy choices, including trade-offs between competing
goods. Agencies report to a President, who in turn answers to the
public for his policy calls; courts have no such accountability and
no proper basis for making policy. And of course Congress has
conferred on that expert, experienced, and politically accountable
agency the authority to administer—to make rules about and
otherwise implement—the statute giving rise to the ambiguity or
gap. Put all that together and deference to the agency is the
almost obvious choice, based on an implicit congressional
delegation of interpretive authority. We defer, the Court has
explained, “because of a presumption that Congress” would have
“desired the agency (rather than the courts)” to exercise “whatever
degree of discretion” the statute allows. Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N. A. , 517
U.S. 735 , 740–741 (1996).

															Today, the Court flips the script: It is now
“the courts (rather than the agency)” that will wield power when
Congress has left an area of interpretive discretion. A rule of
judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris. In recent
years, this Court has too often taken for itself decision-making
authority Congress assigned to agencies. The Court has substituted
its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration; its own judgment on climate
change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own
judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education.
See, e.g. , National Federation of Independent
Business v. OSHA , 595 U.S. 109 (2022); West
Virginia v. EPA , 597 U.S. 697 (2022); Biden v. Nebraska , 600 U.S. 477 (2023). But evidently that was, for
this Court, all too piecemeal. In one fell swoop, the majority
today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter
how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of
regulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, the
majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar. It
defends that move as one (suddenly) required by the (nearly
80-year-old) Administrative Procedure Act. But the Act makes no
such demand. Today’s decision is not one Congress directed. It is
entirely the majority’s choice.

															And the majority cannot destroy one doctrine of
judicial humility without making a laughing-stock of a second. (If
opinions had titles, a good candidate for today’s would be Hubris
Squared.) Stare decisis is, among other things, a way to
remind judges that wisdom often lies in what prior judges have
done. It is a brake on the urge to convert “every new judge’s
opinion” into a new legal rule or regime. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , 597 U.S. 215, 388
(2022) (joint opinion of Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, JJ.,
dissenting) (quoting 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of
England 69 (7th ed. 1775)). Chevron is entrenched precedent,
entitled to the protection of stare decisis , as even the
majority acknowledges. In fact, Chevron is entitled to the
supercharged version of that doctrine because Congress could always
overrule the decision, and because so many governmental and private
actors have relied on it for so long. Because that is so, the
majority needs a “particularly special justification” for its
action. Kisor v. Wilkie , 588 U.S. 558, 588 (2019)
(opinion of the Court). But the majority has nothing that would
qualify. It barely tries to advance the usual factors this Court
invokes for overruling precedent. Its justification comes down, in
the end, to this: Courts must have more say over regulation—over
the provision of health care, the protection of the environment,
the safety of consumer products, the efficacy of transportation
systems, and so on. A longstanding precedent at the crux of
administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of
judicial authority. The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for
power.

															I

															Begin with the problem that gave rise to Chevron (and also to its older precursors): The regulatory
statutes Congress passes often contain ambiguities and gaps.
Sometimes they are intentional. Perhaps Congress “consciously
desired” the administering agency to fill in aspects of the
legislative scheme, believing that regulatory experts would be “in
a better position” than legislators to do so. Chevron , 467
U. S., at 865. Or “perhaps Congress was unable to forge a
coalition on either side” of a question, and the contending parties
“decided to take their chances with” the agency’s resolution. Ibid. Sometimes, though, the gaps or ambiguities are what
might be thought of as predictable accidents. They may be the
result of sloppy drafting, a not infrequent legislative occurrence.
Or they may arise from the well-known limits of language or
foresight. Accord, ante , at 7, 22. “The subject matter” of a
statutory provision may be too “specialized and varying” to
“capture in its every detail.” Kisor , 588 U. S., at 566
(plurality opinion). Or the provision may give rise, years or
decades down the road, to an issue the enacting Congress could not
have anticipated. Whichever the case—whatever the reason—the result
is to create uncertainty about some aspect of a provision’s
meaning.

															Consider a few examples from the caselaw. They
will help show what a typical Chevron question looks like—or
really, what a typical Chevron question is . Because
when choosing whether to send some class of questions mainly to a
court, or mainly to an agency, abstract analysis can only go so
far; indeed, it may obscure what matters most. So I begin with the
concrete:

															Under the Public Health Service Act, the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates “biological product[s],”
including “protein[s].” 42 U. S. C. §262(i)(1). When does
an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as such a “protein”? Must it
have a specific, defined sequence of amino acids? See Teva
Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. FDA , 514 F. Supp. 3d 66,
79–80, 93–106 (DC 2020).

															Under the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and
Wildlife Service must designate endangered “vertebrate fish or
wildlife” species, including “distinct population segment[s]” of
those species. 16 U. S. C. §1532(16); see §1533. What
makes one population segment “distinct” from another? Must the
Service treat the Washington State population of western gray
squirrels as “distinct”

															00because it is geographically separated from
other western gray squirrels? Or can the Service take into account
that the genetic makeup of the Washington population does not
differ markedly from the rest? See Northwest Ecosystem
Alliance v. United States Fish and Wildlife Serv. , 475
F.3d 1136, 1140–1145, 1149 (CA9 2007).

															Under the Medicare program, reimbursements to
hospitals are adjusted to reflect “differences in hospital wage
levels” across “geographic area[s].” 42 U. S. C.
§1395ww(d)(3)(E)(i). How should the Department of Health and Human
Services measure a “geographic area”? By city? By county? By
metropolitan area? See Bellevue Hospital Center v. Leavitt , 443 F.3d 163 , 174–176 (CA2 2006).

															Congress directed the Department of the
Interior and the Federal Aviation Administration to reduce noise
from aircraft flying over Grand Canyon National Park—specifically,
to “provide for substantial restoration of the natural quiet.”
§3(b)(1), 101 Stat. 676; see §3(b)(2). How much noise is consistent
with “the natural quiet”? And how much of the park, for how many
hours a day, must be that quiet for the “substantial restoration”
requirement to be met? See Grand Canyon Air Tour Coalition v. FAA , 154 F.3d 455 , 466–467, 474–475 (CADC 1998).

															Or take Chevron itself. In amendments to
the Clean Air Act, Congress told States to require permits for
modifying or constructing “stationary sources” of air pollution. 42
U. S. C. §7502(c)(5). Does the term “stationary
source[ ]” refer to each pollution-emitting piece of equipment
within a plant? Or does it refer to the entire plant, and thus
allow escape from the permitting requirement when increased
emissions from one piece of equipment are offset by reductions from
another? See 467 U. S., at 857, 859.

															In each case, a statutory phrase has more than
one reasonable reading. And Congress has not chosen among them: It
has not, in any real-world sense, “fixed” the “single, best
meaning” at “the time of enactment” (to use the majority’s phrase). Ante , at 22. A question thus arises: Who decides which of
the possible readings should govern?

															This Court has long thought that the choice
should usually fall to agencies, with courts broadly deferring to
their judgments. For the last 40 years, that doctrine has gone by
the name of Chevron deference, after the 1984 decision that
formalized and canonized it. In Chevron , the Court set out a
simple two-part framework for reviewing an agency’s interpretation
of a statute that it administers. First, the reviewing court must
determine whether Congress has “directly spoken to the precise
question at issue.” 467 U. S., at 842. That inquiry is
rigorous: A court must exhaust all the “traditional tools of
statutory construction” to divine statutory meaning. Id. , at
843, n. 9. And when it can find that meaning—a “single right
answer”—that is “the end of the matter”: The court cannot defer
because it “must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent
of Congress.” Kisor , 588 U. S., at 575 (opinion of the
Court); Chevron , 467 U. S., at 842–843. But if the
court, after using its whole legal toolkit, concludes that “the
statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue”
in dispute—for any of the not-uncommon reasons discussed above—then
the court must cede the primary interpretive role. Ibid. ;
see supra , at 4–5. At that second step, the court asks only
whether the agency construction is within the sphere of
“reasonable” readings. Chevron , 467 U. S., at 844. If
it is, the agency’s interpretation of the statute that it every day
implements will control.

															That rule, the Court has long explained, rests
on a presumption about legislative intent—about what Congress wants
when a statute it has charged an agency with implementing contains
an ambiguity or a gap. See id. , at 843–845; Smiley ,
517 U. S., at 740–741. An enacting Congress, as noted above,
knows those uncertainties will arise, even if it does not know what
they will turn out to be. See supra , at 4–5. And every once
in a while, Congress provides an explicit instruction for dealing
with that contingency—assigning primary responsibility to the
courts, or else to an agency. But much more often, Congress does
not say. Thus arises the need for a presumption—really, a default
rule—for what should happen in that event. Does a statutory silence
or ambiguity then go to a court for resolution? Or to an agency?
This Court has long thought Congress would choose an agency, with
courts serving only as a backstop to make sure the agency makes a
reasonable choice among the possible readings. Or said otherwise,
Congress would select the agency it has put in control of a
regulatory scheme to exercise the “degree of discretion” that the
statute’s lack of clarity or completeness allows. Smiley ,
517 U. S., at 741. Of course, Congress can always refute that
presumptive choice—can say that, really, it would prefer courts to
wield that discretionary power. But until then, the presumption
cuts in the agency’s favor.[ 2 ]
The next question is why.

															For one, because agencies often know things
about a statute’s subject matter that courts could not hope to. The
point is especially stark when the statute is of a “scientific or
technical nature.” Kisor , 588 U. S., at 571 (plurality
opinion). Agencies are staffed with “experts in the field” who can
bring their training and knowledge to bear on open statutory
questions. Chevron , 467 U. S., at 865. Consider, for
example, the first bulleted case above. When does an alpha amino
acid polymer qualify as a “protein”? See supra , at 5. I
don’t know many judges who would feel confident resolving that
issue. (First question: What even is an alpha amino acid
polymer?) But the FDA likely has scores of scientists on staff who
can think intelligently about it, maybe collaborate with each other
on its finer points, and arrive at a sensible answer. Or take the
perhaps more accessible-sounding second case, involving the
Endangered Species Act. See supra , at 5–6. Deciding when one
squirrel population is “distinct” from another (and thus warrants
protection) requires knowing about species more than it does
consulting a dictionary. How much variation of what
kind—geographic, genetic, morphological, or behavioral—should be
required? A court could, if forced to, muddle through that issue
and announce a result. But wouldn’t the Fish and Wildlife Service,
with all its specialized expertise, do a better job of the task—of
saying what, in the context of species protection, the open-ended
term “distinct” means? One idea behind the Chevron presumption is that Congress—the same Congress that charged the
Service with implementing the Act—would answer that question with a
resounding “yes.”

															A second idea is that Congress would value the
agency’s experience with how a complex regulatory regime functions,
and with what is needed to make it effective. Let’s stick with
squirrels for a moment, except broaden the lens. In construing a
term like “distinct” in a case about squirrels, the Service likely
would benefit from its “historical familiarity” with how the term
has covered the population segments of other species. Martin v. Occupational Safety and Health Review Comm’n , 499 U.S.
144 , 153 (1991); see, e.g. , Center for Biological
Diversity v. Zinke , 900 F.3d 1053, 1060–1062 (CA9 2018)
(arctic grayling); Center for Biological Diversity v. Zinke , 868 F.3d 1054, 1056 (CA9 2017) (desert eagle). Just
as a common-law court makes better decisions as it sees multiple
variations on a theme, an agency’s construction of a statutory term
benefits from its unique exposure to all the related ways the term
comes into play. Or consider, for another way regulatory
familiarity matters, the example about adjusting Medicare
reimbursement for geographic wage differences. See supra , at
6. According to a dictionary, the term “geographic area” could be
as large as a multi-state region or as small as a census tract. How
to choose? It would make sense to gather hard information about
what reimbursement levels each approach will produce, to explore
the ease of administering each on a nationwide basis, to survey how
regulators have dealt with similar questions in the past, and to
confer with the hospitals themselves about what makes sense. See Kisor , 588 U. S., at 571 (plurality opinion) (noting
that agencies are able to “conduct factual investigations” and
“consult with affected parties”). Congress knows the Department of
Health and Human Services can do all those things—and that courts
cannot.

															Still more, Chevron ’s presumption
reflects that resolving statutory ambiguities, as Congress well
knows, is “often more a question of policy than of law.” Pauley v. BethEnergy Mines, Inc. , 501 U.S.
680 , 696 (1991). The task is less one of construing a text than
of balancing competing goals and values. Consider the statutory
directive to achieve “substantial restoration of the [Grand
Canyon’s] natural quiet.” See supra , at 6. Someone is going
to have to decide exactly what that statute means for air traffic
over the canyon. How many flights, in what places and at what
times, are consistent with restoring enough natural quiet on the
ground? That is a policy trade-off of a kind familiar to
agencies—but peculiarly unsuited to judges. Or consider Chevron itself. As the Court there understood, the choice
between defining a “stationary source” as a whole plant or as a
pollution-emitting device is a choice about how to “reconcile” two
“manifestly competing interests.” 467 U. S., at 865. The
plantwide definition relaxes the permitting requirement in the
interest of promoting economic growth; the device-specific
definition strengthens that requirement to better reduce air
pollution. See id. , at 851, 863, 866. Again, that is a
choice a judge should not be making, but one an agency properly
can. Agencies are “subject to the supervision of the President, who
in turn answers to the public.” Kisor , 588 U. S., at
571–572 (plurality opinion). So when faced with a statutory
ambiguity, “an agency to which Congress has delegated policymaking
responsibilities” may rely on an accountable actor’s “views of wise
policy to inform its judgments.” Chevron , 467 U. S., at
865.

															None of this is to say that deference to
agencies is always appropriate. The Court over time has fine-tuned
the Chevron regime to deny deference in classes of cases in
which Congress has no reason to prefer an agency to a court. The
majority treats those “refinements” as a flaw in the scheme, ante , at 27, but they are anything but. Consider the rule
that an agency gets no deference when construing a statute it is
not responsible for administering. See Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis , 584 U.S. 497, 519–520 (2018). Well, of course not—if
Congress has not put an agency in charge of implementing a statute,
Congress would not have given the agency a special role in its
construction. Or take the rule that an agency will not receive
deference if it has reached its decision without using—or without
using properly—its rulemaking or adjudicatory authority. See United States v. Mead Corp. , 533
U.S. 218 , 226–227 (2001); Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro , 579 U.S. 211, 220 (2016). Again, that should not be
surprising: Congress expects that authoritative pronouncements on a
law’s meaning will come from the procedures it has enacted to
foster “fairness and deliberation” in agency decision-making. Mead , 533 U. S., at 230. Or finally, think of the
“extraordinary cases” involving questions of vast “economic and
political significance” in which the Court has declined to defer. King v. Burwell , 576 U.S.
473 , 485–486 (2015). The theory is that Congress would not have
left matters of such import to an agency, but would instead have
insisted on maintaining control. So the Chevron refinements
proceed from the same place as the original doctrine. Taken
together, they give interpretive primacy to the agency when—but
only when—it is acting, as Congress specified, in the heartland of
its delegated authority.

															That carefully calibrated framework “reflects a
sensitivity to the proper roles of the political and judicial
branches.” Pauley , 501 U. S., at 696. Where Congress
has spoken, Congress has spoken; only its judgments matter. And
courts alone determine when that has happened: Using all their
normal interpretive tools, they decide whether Congress has
addressed a given issue. But when courts have decided that Congress
has not done so, a choice arises. Absent a legislative directive,
either the administering agency or a court must take the lead. And
the matter is more fit for the agency. The decision is likely to
involve the agency’s subject-matter expertise; to fall within its
sphere of regulatory experience; and to involve policy choices,
including cost-benefit assessments and trade-offs between
conflicting values. So a court without relevant expertise or
experience, and without warrant to make policy calls, appropriately
steps back. The court still has a role to play: It polices the
agency to ensure that it acts within the zone of reasonable
options. But the court does not insert itself into an agency’s
expertise-driven, policy-laden functions. That is the arrangement
best suited to keep every actor in its proper lane. And it is the
one best suited to ensure that Congress’s statutes work in the way
Congress intended.

															The majority makes two points in reply, neither
convincing. First, it insists that “agencies have no special
competence” in filling gaps or resolving ambiguities in regulatory
statutes; rather, “[c]ourts do.” Ante , at 23. Score one for
self-confidence; maybe not so high for self-reflection or
-knowledge. Of course courts often construe legal texts, hopefully
well. And Chevron ’s first step takes full advantage of that
talent: There, a court tries to divine what Congress meant, even in
the most complicated or abstruse statutory schemes. The deference
comes in only if the court cannot do so—if the court must admit
that standard legal tools will not avail to fill a statutory
silence or give content to an ambiguous term. That is when the
issues look like the ones I started off with: When does an alpha
amino acid polymer qualify as a “protein”? How distinct is
“distinct” for squirrel populations? What size “geographic area”
will ensure appropriate hospital reimbursement? As between two
equally feasible understandings of “stationary source,” should one
choose the one more protective of the environment or the one more
favorable to economic growth? The idea that courts have “special
competence” in deciding such questions whereas agencies have
“no[ne]” is, if I may say, malarkey. Answering those questions
right does not mainly demand the interpretive skills courts
possess. Instead, it demands one or more of: subject-matter
expertise, long engagement with a regulatory scheme, and policy
choice. It is courts (not agencies) that “have no special
competence”—or even legitimacy—when those are the things a decision
calls for.

															Second, the majority complains that an ambiguity
or gap does not “necessarily reflect a congressional intent that an
agency” should have primary interpretive authority. Ante , at
22. On that score, I’ll agree with the premise: It doesn’t
“necessarily” do so. Chevron is built on a presumption . The decision does not maintain that Congress in
every case wants the agency, rather than a court, to fill in gaps.
The decision maintains that when Congress does not expressly pick
one or the other, we need a default rule; and the best default
rule—agency or court?—is the one we think Congress would generally
want. As to why Congress would generally want the agency:
The answer lies in everything said above about Congress’s
delegation of regulatory power to the agency and the agency’s
special competencies. See supra , at 9–11. The majority
appears to think it is a showstopping rejoinder to note that many
statutory gaps and ambiguities are “unintentional.” Ante , at
22. But to begin, many are not; the ratio between the two is
uncertain. See supra , at 4–5. And to end, why should that
matter in any event? Congress may not have deliberately introduced
a gap or ambiguity into the statute; but it knows that pretty much
everything it drafts will someday be found to contain such a
“flaw.” Given that knowledge, Chevron asks, what would
Congress want? The presumed answer is again the same (for the same
reasons): The agency. And as with any default rule, if Congress
decides otherwise, all it need do is say.

															In that respect, the proof really is in the
pudding: Congress basically never says otherwise, suggesting that Chevron chose the presumption aligning with legislative
intent (or, in the majority’s words, “approximat[ing] reality,” ante , at 22). Over the last four decades, Congress has
authorized or reauthorized hundreds of statutes. The drafters of
those statutes knew all about Chevron . See A. Gluck & L.
Bressman, Statutory Interpretation From the Inside—An Empirical
Study of Congressional Drafting, Delegation, and the Canons: Part
I, 65 Stan. L. Rev. 901, 928 (fig. 2), 994 (2013). So if they had
wanted a different assignment of interpretive responsibility, they
would have inserted a provision to that effect. With just a pair of
exceptions I know of, they did not. See 12 U. S. C.
§25b(b)(5)(A) (exception #1); 15 U. S. C. §8302(c)(3)(A)
(exception #2). Similarly, Congress has declined to enact proposed
legislation that would abolish Chevron across the board. See
S. 909, 116th Cong., 1st Sess., §2 (2019) (still a bill, not a
law); H. R. 5, 115th Cong., 1st Sess., §202 (2017) (same). So to
the extent the majority is worried that the Chevron presumption is “fiction[al],” ante , at 26—as all legal
presumptions in some sense are—it has gotten less and less so every
day for 40 years. The congressional reaction shows as well as
anything could that the Chevron Court read Congress
right.

															II

															The majority’s principal arguments are in a
different vein. Around 80 years after the APA was enacted and 40
years after Chevron , the majority has decided that the
former precludes the latter. The APA’s Section 706, the majority
says, “makes clear” that agency interpretations of statutes “are not entitled to deference.” Ante , at 14–15 (emphasis
in original). And that provision, the majority continues, codified
the contemporaneous law, which likewise did not allow for
deference. See ante, at 9–13, 15–16. But neither the APA nor
the pre-APA state of the law does the work that the majority
claims. Both are perfectly compatible with Chevron deference.

															Section 706, enacted with the rest of the APA in
1946, provides for judicial review of agency action. It states: “To
the extent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewing
court shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret
constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning
or applicability of the terms of an agency action.” 5
U. S. C. §706.

															That text, contra the majority, “does not
resolve the Chevron question.” C. Sunstein, Chevron As Law, 107 Geo. L. J. 1613, 1642 (2019) (Sunstein). Or said a bit
differently, Section 706 is “generally indeterminate” on the matter
of deference. A. Vermeule, Judging Under Uncertainty 207 (2006)
(Vermeule). The majority highlights the phrase “decide all relevant
questions of law” (italicizing the “all”), and notes that the
provision “prescribes no deferential standard” for answering those
questions. Ante , at 14. But just as the provision does not
prescribe a deferential standard of review, so too it does not
prescribe a de novo standard of review (in which the
court starts from scratch, without giving deference). In point of
fact, Section 706 does not specify any standard of review
for construing statutes. See Kisor , 588 U. S., at 581
(plurality opinion). And when a court uses a deferential
standard—here, by deciding whether an agency reading is
reasonable—it just as much “decide[s]” a “relevant question[ ]
of law” as when it uses a de novo standard. §706. The
deferring court then conforms to Section 706 “by determining
whether the agency has stayed within the bounds of its assigned
discretion—that is, whether the agency has construed [the statute
it administers] reasonably.” J. Manning, Chevron and the
Reasonable Legislator, 128 Harv. L. Rev. 457, 459 (2014); see Arlington v. FCC , 569 U.S.
290 , 317 (2013) (Roberts, C. J., dissenting) (“We do not ignore
[Section 706’s] command when we afford an agency’s statutory
interpretation Chevron deference; we respect it”).[ 3 ]

															Section 706’s references to standards of review
in other contexts only further undercut the majority’s argument.
The majority notes that Section 706 requires deferential review for
agency fact-finding and policy-making (under, respectively, a
substantial-evidence standard and an arbitrary-and-capricious
standard). See ante , at 14. Congress, the majority claims,
“surely would have articulated a similarly deferential standard
applicable to questions of law had it intended to depart” from de novo review. Ibid. Surely? In another part of
Section 706, Congress explicitly referred to de novo review. §706(2)(F). With all those references to standards of
review—both deferential and not—running around Section 706, what is
“telling” ( ante , at 14) is the absence of any standard for
reviewing an agency’s statutory constructions. That silence left
the matter, as noted above, “generally indeterminate”: Section 706
neither mandates nor forbids Chevron -style deference.
Vermeule 207.[ 4 ]

															And contra the majority, most “respected
commentators” understood Section 706 in that way—as allowing, even
if not requiring, deference. Ante , at 16. The finest
administrative law scholars of the time (call them that
generation’s Manning, Sunstein, and Vermeule) certainly did.
Professor Louis Jaffe described something very like the Chevron two-step as the preferred method of reviewing agency
interpretations under the APA. A court, he said, first “must decide
as a ‘question of law’ whether there is ‘discretion’ in the
premises.” Judicial Control of Administrative Action 570 (1965).
That is akin to step 1: Did Congress speak to the issue, or did it
leave openness? And if the latter, Jaffe continued, the agency’s
view “if ‘reasonable’ is free of control.” Ibid. That of
course looks like step 2: defer if reasonable. And just in case
that description was too complicated, Jaffe conveyed his main point
this way: The argument that courts “must decide all questions of
law”—as if there were no agency in the picture—“is, in my opinion,
unsound.” Id. , at 569. Similarly, Professor Kenneth Culp
Davis, author of the then-preeminent treatise on administrative
law, noted with approval that “reasonableness” review of agency
interpretations—in which courts “refused to substitute
judgment”—had “survived the APA.” Administrative Law 880, 883, 885
(1951) (Davis). Other contemporaneous scholars and experts agreed.
See R. Levin, The APA and the Assault on Deference, 106 Minn. L.
Rev. 125, 181–183 (2021) (Levin) (listing many of them). They did
not see in their own time what the majority finds there
today.[ 5 ]

															Nor, evidently, did the Supreme Court. In the
years after the APA was enacted, the Court “never indicated that
section 706 rejected the idea that courts might defer to agency
interpretations of law.” Sunstein 1654. Indeed, not a single
Justice so much as floated that view of the APA. To the contrary,
the Court issued a number of decisions in those years deferring to
an agency’s statutory interpretation. See, e.g. , Unemployment Compensation Comm’n of Alaska v. Aragon , 329 U.S.
143 , 153–154 (1946); NLRB v. E. C. Atkins &
Co. , 331 U.S.
398 , 403 (1947); Cardillo v. Liberty Mut. Ins.
Co. , 330 U.S.
469 , 478–479 (1947). And that continued right up until Chevron . See, e.g. , Mitchell v. Budd , 350 U.S.
473 , 480 (1956); Zenith Radio Corp. v. United
States , 437 U.S.
443 , 450 (1978). To be clear: Deference in those years was not
always given to interpretations that would receive it under Chevron . The practice then was more inconsistent and less
fully elaborated than it later became. The point here is only that
the Court came nowhere close to accepting the majority’s view of
the APA. Take the language from Section 706 that the majority most
relies on: “decide all relevant questions of law.” See ante ,
at 14. In the decade after the APA’s enactment, those words were
used only four times in Supreme Court opinions (all in
footnotes)—and never to suggest that courts could not defer to
agency interpretations. See Sunstein 1656.

															The majority’s view of Section 706 likewise gets
no support from how judicial review operated in the years leading
up to the APA. That prior history matters: As the majority
recognizes, Section 706 was generally understood to
“restate[ ] the present law as to the scope of judicial
review.” Dept. of Justice, Attorney General’s Manual on the
Administrative Procedure Act 108 (1947); ante , at 15–16. The
problem for the majority is that in the years preceding the APA,
courts became ever more deferential to agencies. New Deal
administrative programs had by that point come into their own. And
this Court and others, in a fairly short time, had abandoned their
initial resistance and gotten on board. Justice Breyer, wearing his
administrative-law-scholar hat, characterized the pre-APA period
this way: “[J]udicial review of administrative action was
curtailed, and particular agency decisions were frequently
sustained with judicial obeisance to the mysteries of
administrative expertise.” S. Breyer et al., Administrative
Law and Regulatory Policy 21 (7th ed. 2011). And that description
extends to review of an agency’s statutory constructions. An
influential study of administrative practice, published five years
before the APA’s enactment, described the state of play: Judicial
“review may, in some instances at least, be limited to the inquiry
whether the administrative construction is a permissible one.”
Final Report of Attorney General’s Committee on Administrative
Procedure (1941), reprinted in Administrative Procedure in
Government Agencies, S. Doc. No. 8, 77th Cong., 1st Sess., 78
(1941). Or again: “[W]here the statute is reasonably susceptible of
more than one interpretation, the court may accept that of the
administrative body.” Id. , at 90–91.[ 6 ]

															Two prominent Supreme Court decisions of the
1940s put those principles into action. Gray v. Powell , 314 U.S.
402 (1941), was then widely understood as “the leading case” on
review of agency interpretations. Davis 882; see ibid. (noting that it “establish[ed] what is known as ‘the doctrine of
Gray v. Powell’ ”). There, the Court deferred to an agency
construction of the term “producer” as used in a statutory
exemption from price controls. Congress, the Court explained, had
committed the scope of the exemption to the agency because its
“experience in [the] field gave promise of a better informed, more
equitable, adjustment of the conflicting interests.” Gray ,
314 U. S., at 412. Accordingly, the Court concluded that it
was “not the province of a court” to “substitute its judgment” for
the agency’s. Ibid. Three years later, the Court decided NLRB v. Hearst Publications, Inc. , 322 U.S.
111 (1944), another acknowledged “leading case.” Davis 882; see id. , at 884. The Court again deferred, this time to an
agency’s construction of the term “employee” in the National Labor
Relations Act. The scope of that term, the Court explained,
“belong[ed] to” the agency to answer based on its “[e]veryday
experience in the administration of the statute.” Hearst ,
322 U. S., at 130. The Court therefore “limited” its review to
whether the agency’s reading had “warrant in the record and a
reasonable basis in law.” Id. , at 131.[ 7 ] Recall here that even the majority accepts that
Section 706 was meant to “restate[ ] the present law” as to
judicial review. See ante , at 15–16; supra , at 19–20.
Well then? It sure would seem that the provision allows a deference
regime.

															The majority has no way around those two
noteworthy decisions. It first appears to distinguish between “pure
legal question[s]” and the so-called mixed questions in Gray and Hearst , involving the application of a legal standard to
a set of facts. Ante , at 11. If in drawing that distinction,
the majority intends to confine its holding to the pure type of
legal issue—thus enabling courts to defer when law and facts are
entwined—I’d be glad. But I suspect the majority has no such
intent, because that approach would preserve Chevron in a
substantial part of its current domain. Cf. Wilkinson v. Garland , 601 U.S. 209, 230 (2024) (Alito, J., dissenting)
(noting, in the immigration context, that the universe of mixed
questions swamps that of pure legal ones). It is frequently in the
consideration of mixed questions that the scope of statutory terms
is established and their meaning defined. See H. Monaghan, Marbury and the Administrative State, 83 Colum. L. Rev. 1,
29 (1983) (“Administrative application of law is administrative
formulation of law whenever it involves elaboration of the
statutory norm”). How does a statutory interpreter decide, as in Hearst , what an “employee” is? In large part through cases
asking whether the term covers people performing specific jobs,
like (in that case) “newsboys.” 322 U. S., at 120. Or consider
one of the examples I offered above. How does an interpreter decide
when one population segment of a species is “distinct” from
another? Often by considering that requirement with respect to
particular species, like western gray squirrels. So the distinction
the majority offers makes no real-world (or even theoretical)
sense. If the Hearst Court was deferring to an agency on
whether the term “employee” covered newsboys, it was deferring to
the agency on the scope and meaning of the term “employee.”

															The majority’s next rejoinder—that “the Court
was far from consistent” in deferring—falls equally flat. Ante , at 12. I am perfectly ready to acknowledge that in the
pre-APA period, a deference regime had not yet taken complete hold.
I’ll go even further: Let’s assume that deference was then an
on-again, off-again function (as the majority seems to suggest, see ante , at 11–12, and 13, n. 3). Even on that assumption,
the majority’s main argument—that Section 706 prohibited deferential review—collapses. Once again, the majority agrees that
Section 706 was not meant to change the then-prevailing law. See ante , at 15–16. And even if inconsistent, that law cannot
possibly be thought to have prohibited deference. Or
otherwise said: “If Section 706 did not change the law of judicial
review (as we have long recognized), then it did not proscribe a
deferential standard then known and in use.” Kisor , 588
U. S., at 583 (plurality opinion).

															The majority’s whole argument for overturning Chevron relies on Section 706. But the text of Section 706
does not support that result. And neither does the contemporaneous
practice, which that text was supposed to reflect. So today’s
decision has no basis in the only law the majority deems relevant.
It is grounded on air.

															III

															And still there is worse, because abandoning Chevron subverts every known principle of stare
decisis . Of course, respecting precedent is not an “inexorable
command.” Payne v. Tennessee , 501
U.S. 808 , 828 (1991). But overthrowing it requires far more
than the majority has offered up here. Chevron is entitled
to stare decisis ’s strongest form of protection. The
majority thus needs an exceptionally strong reason to overturn the
decision, above and beyond thinking it wrong. And it has nothing
approaching such a justification, proposing only a bewildering
theory about Chevron ’s “unworkability.” Ante , at 32.
Just five years ago, this Court in Kisor rejected a plea to
overrule Auer v. Robbins , 519
U.S. 452 (1997), which requires judicial deference to agencies’
interpretations of their own regulations. See 588 U. S., at
586–589 (opinion of the Court). The case against overruling Chevron is at least as strong. In particular, the majority’s
decision today will cause a massive shock to the legal system,
“cast[ing] doubt on many settled constructions” of statutes and
threatening the interests of many parties who have relied on them
for years. 588 U. S., at 587 (opinion of the Court).

															Adherence to precedent is “a foundation stone of
the rule of law.” Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian
Community , 572 U.S.
782 , 798 (2014). Stare decisis “promotes the evenhanded,
predictable, and consistent development of legal principles.” Payne , 501 U. S., at 827. It enables people to order
their lives in reliance on judicial decisions. And it “contributes
to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process,” by
ensuring that those decisions are founded in the law, and not in
the “personal preferences” of judges. Id. , at 828; Dobbs , 597 U. S., at 388 (dissenting opinion). Perhaps
above all else, stare decisis is a “doctrine of judicial
modesty.” Id. , at 363. In that, it shares something
important with Chevron . Both tell judges that they do not
know everything, and would do well to attend to the views of
others. So today, the majority rejects what judicial humility
counsels not just once but twice over.

															And Chevron is entitled to a particularly
strong form of stare decisis , for two separate reasons.
First, it matters that “Congress remains free to alter what we have
done.” Patterson v. McLean Credit Union , 491 U.S.
164 , 173 (1989); see Kisor , 588 U. S., at 587
(opinion of the Court) (making the same point for Auer deference). In a constitutional case, the Court alone can correct
an error. But that is not so here. “Our deference decisions are
balls tossed into Congress’s court, for acceptance or not as that
branch elects.” 588 U. S., at 587–588 (opinion of the Court).
And for generations now, Congress has chosen acceptance. Throughout
those years, Congress could have abolished Chevron across
the board, most easily by amending the APA. Or it could have
eliminated deferential review in discrete areas, by amending old
laws or drafting new laws to include an anti- Chevron provision. Instead, Congress has “spurned multiple opportunities”
to do a comprehensive rejection of Chevron , and has hardly
ever done a targeted one. Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment,
LLC , 576 U.S.
446 , 456 (2015); see supra , at 14–15. Or to put the
point more affirmatively, Congress has kept Chevron as is
for 40 years. It maintained that position even as Members of this
Court began to call Chevron into question. See ante ,
at 30. From all it appears, Congress has not agreed with the view
of some Justices that they and other judges should have more
power.

															Second, Chevron is by now much more than
a single decision. This Court alone, acting as Chevron allows, has upheld an agency’s reasonable interpretation of a
statute at least 70 times. See Brief for United States in No.
22–1219, p. 27; App. to id ., at 68a–72a (collecting cases).
Lower courts have applied the Chevron framework on thousands
upon thousands of occasions. See K. Barnett & C. Walker, Chevron and Stare Decisis, 31 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 475,
477, and n. 11 (2024) (noting that at last count, Chevron was cited in more than 18,000 federal-court
decisions). The Kisor Court observed, when upholding Auer , that “[d]eference to reasonable agency interpretations
of ambiguous rules pervades the whole corpus of administrative
law.” 588 U. S., at 587 (opinion of the Court). So too does
deference to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous
statutes—except more so. Chevron is as embedded as embedded
gets in the law.

															The majority says differently, because this
Court has ignored Chevron lately; all that is left of the
decision is a “decaying husk with bold pretensions.” Ante ,
at 33. Tell that to the D. C. Circuit, the court that reviews
a large share of agency interpretations, where Chevron remains alive and well. See, e.g. , Lissack v. Commissioner , 68 F. 4th 1312, 1321–1322 (2023); Solar
Energy Industries Assn. v. FERC , 59 F. 4th 1287,
1291–1294 (2023). But more to the point: The majority’s argument is
a bootstrap. This Court has “avoided deferring under Chevron since 2016” ( ante , at 32) because it has been preparing to
overrule Chevron since around that time. That kind of
self-help on the way to reversing precedent has become almost
routine at this Court. Stop applying a decision where one should;
“throw some gratuitous criticisms into a couple of opinions”; issue
a few separate writings “question[ing the decision’s] premises”
( ante , at 30); give the whole process a few years
. . . and voila!—you have a justification for overruling
the decision. Janus v. State, County, and Municipal
Employees , 585 U.S. 878, 950 (2018) (Kagan, J., dissenting)
(discussing the overruling of Abood v. Detroit Bd. of
Ed. , 431 U.S.
209 (1977)); see also, e.g. , Kennedy v. Bremerton School Dist. , 597 U.S. 507, 571–572 (2022)
(Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (similar for Lemon v. Kurtzman , 403 U.S.
602 (1971)); Shelby County v. Holder , 570 U.S.
529 , 587–588 (2013) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (similar for South Carolina v. Katzenbach , 383
U.S. 301 (1966)). I once remarked that this
overruling-through-enfeeblement technique “mock[ed] stare
decisis .” Janus , 585 U. S., at 950 (dissenting
opinion). I have seen no reason to change my mind.

															The majority does no better in its main
justification for overruling Chevron —that the decision is
“unworkable.” Ante , at 30. The majority’s first theory on
that score is that there is no single “answer” about what
“ambiguity” means: Some judges turn out to see more of it than
others do, leading to “different results.” Ante , at 30–31.
But even if so, the legal system has for many years, in many
contexts, dealt perfectly well with that variation. Take contract
law. It is hornbook stuff that when (but only when) a contract is
ambiguous, a court interpreting it can consult extrinsic evidence.
See CNH Industrial N.V. v. Reese , 583 U.S. 133, 139
(2018) ( per curiam ). And when all interpretive tools still
leave ambiguity, the contract is construed against the drafter. See Lamps Plus, Inc. v. Varela , 587 U.S. 176, 186–187
(2019). So I guess the contract rules of the 50 States are
unworkable now. Or look closer to home, to doctrines this Court
regularly applies. In deciding whether a government has waived
sovereign immunity, we construe “[a]ny ambiguities in the statutory
language” in “favor of immunity.” FAA v. Cooper , 566 U.S.
284 , 290 (2012). Similarly, the rule of lenity tells us to
construe ambiguous statutes in favor of criminal defendants. See United States v. Castleman , 572
U.S. 157 , 172–173 (2014). And the canon of constitutional
avoidance instructs us to construe ambiguous laws to avoid
difficult constitutional questions. See United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative , 532 U.S.
483 , 494 (2001). I could go on, but the point is made. There
are ambiguity triggers all over the law. Somehow everyone seems to
get by.

															And Chevron is an especially puzzling
decision to criticize on the ground of generating too much judicial
divergence. There’s good empirical—meaning,
non-impressionistic—evidence on exactly that subject. And it shows
that, as compared with de novo review, use of the Chevron two-step framework fosters agreement among
judges. See K. Barnett, C. Boyd, & C. Walker, Administrative
Law’s Political Dynamics, 71 Vand. L. Rev. 1463, 1502 (2018)
(Barnett). More particularly, Chevron has a “powerful
constraining effect on partisanship in judicial decisionmaking.”
Barnett 1463 (italics deleted); see Sunstein 1672 (“[A] predictable
effect of overruling Chevron would be to ensure a far
greater role for judicial policy preferences in statutory
interpretation and far more common splits along ideological
lines”). So if consistency among judges is the majority’s lodestar,
then the Court should not overrule Chevron , but return to
using it.

															The majority’s second theory on workability is
likewise a makeweight. Chevron , the majority complains, has
some exceptions, which (so the majority says) are “difficult” and
“complicate[d]” to apply. Ante , at 32. Recall that courts
are not supposed to defer when the agency construing a statute (1)
has not been charged with administering that law; (2) has not used
deliberative procedures— i.e., notice-and-comment rulemaking
or adjudication; or (3) is intervening in a “major question,” of
great economic and political significance. See supra , at
11–12; ante , at 27–28. As I’ve explained, those
exceptions—the majority also aptly calls them “refinements”—fit
with Chevron ’s rationale: They define circumstances in which
Congress is unlikely to have wanted agency views to govern. Ante , at 27; see supra , at 11–12. And on the
difficulty scale, they are nothing much. Has Congress put the
agency in charge of administering the statute? In 99 of 100 cases,
everyone will agree on the answer with scarcely a moment’s thought.
Did the agency use notice-and-comment or an adjudication before
rendering an interpretation? Once again, I could stretch my mind
and think up a few edge cases, but for the most part, the answer is
an easy yes or no. The major questions exception is, I acknowledge,
different: There, many judges have indeed disputed its nature and
scope. Compare, e . g ., West Virginia , 597
U. S., at 721–724, with id ., at 764–770 (Kagan, J.,
dissenting). But that disagreement concerns, on everyone’s view, a
tiny subset of all agency interpretations. For the most part, the
exceptions that so upset the majority require merely a rote,
check-the-box inquiry. If that is the majority’s idea of a
“dizzying breakdance,” ante , at 32, the majority needs to
get out more.

															And anyway, difficult as compared to what? The
majority’s prescribed way of proceeding is no walk in the park.
First, the majority makes clear that what is usually called Skidmore deference continues to apply. See ante , at
16–17. Under that decision, agency interpretations “constitute a
body of experience and informed judgment” that may be “entitled to
respect.” Skidmore v. Swift & Co. , 323 U.S.
134 , 140 (1944). If the majority thinks that the same judges
who argue today about where “ambiguity” resides (see ante ,
at 30) are not going to argue tomorrow about what “respect”
requires, I fear it will be gravely disappointed. Second, the
majority directs courts to comply with the varied ways in which
Congress in fact “delegates discretionary authority” to agencies. Ante , at 17–18. For example, Congress may authorize an
agency to “define[ ]” or “delimit[ ]” statutory terms or
concepts, or to “fill up the details” of a statutory scheme. Ante , at 17, and n. 5. Or Congress may use, in
describing an agency’s regulatory authority, inherently
“flexib[le]” language like “appropriate” or “reasonable.” Ante , at 17, and n. 6. Attending to every such delegation,
as the majority says, is necessary in a world without Chevron . But that task involves complexities of its own.
Indeed, one reason Justice Scalia supported Chevron was that
it replaced such a “statute-by-statute evaluation (which was
assuredly a font of uncertainty and litigation) with an
across-the-board presumption.” A. Scalia, Judicial Deference to
Administrative Interpretations of Law, 1989 Duke L. J. 511, 516. As
a lover of the predictability that rules create, Justice Scalia
thought the latter “unquestionably better.” Id. , at 517.

															On the other side of the balance, the most
important stare decisis factor—call it the “jolt to the
legal system” issue—weighs heavily against overruling Chevron . Dobbs , 597 U. S., at 357 (Roberts,
C. J., concurring in judgment). Congress and agencies alike
have relied on Chevron —have assumed its existence—in much of
their work for the last 40 years. Statutes passed during that time
reflect the expectation that Chevron would allocate
interpretive authority between agencies and courts. Rules issued
during the period likewise presuppose that statutory ambiguities
were the agencies’ to (reasonably) resolve. Those agency
interpretations may have benefited regulated entities; or they may
have protected members of the broader public. Either way, private
parties have ordered their affairs—their business and financial
decisions, their health-care decisions, their educational
decisions—around agency actions that are suddenly now subject to
challenge. In Kisor , this Court refused to overrule Auer because doing so would “cast doubt on” many
longstanding constructions of rules, and thereby upset settled
expectations. 588 U. S., at 587 (opinion of the Court).
Overruling Chevron , and thus raising new doubts about agency
constructions of statutes, will be far more disruptive.

															The majority tries to alleviate concerns about a
piece of that problem: It states that judicial decisions that have
upheld agency action as reasonable under Chevron should not
be overruled on that account alone. See ante , at 34–35. That
is all to the good: There are thousands of such decisions, many
settled for decades. See supra , at 26. But first, reasonable
reliance need not be predicated on a prior judicial decision. Some
agency interpretations never challenged under Chevron now
will be; expectations formed around those constructions thus could
be upset, in a way the majority’s assurance does not touch. And
anyway, how good is that assurance, really? The majority says that
a decision’s “[m]ere reliance on Chevron ” is not enough to
counter the force of stare decisis ; a challenger will need
an additional “special justification.” Ante , at 34. The
majority is sanguine; I am not so much. Courts motivated to
overrule an old Chevron -based decision can always come up
with something to label a “special justification.” Maybe a court
will say “the quality of [the precedent’s] reasoning” was poor. Ante , at 29. Or maybe the court will discover something
“unworkable” in the decision—like some exception that has to be
applied. Ante , at 30. All a court need do is look to today’s
opinion to see how it is done.

															IV

															Judges are not experts in the field, and
are not part of either political branch of the Government. — Chevron
U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense
Council, Inc. , 467 U.S.
837 , 865 (1984)

															Those were the days, when we knew what we are
not. When we knew that as between courts and agencies, Congress
would usually think agencies the better choice to resolve the
ambiguities and fill the gaps in regulatory statutes. Because
agencies are “experts in the field.” And because they are part of a political branch, with a claim to making
interstitial policy. And because Congress has charged them, not us,
with administering the statutes containing the open questions. At
its core, Chevron is about respecting that allocation of
responsibility—the conferral of primary authority over regulatory
matters to agencies, not courts.

															Today, the majority does not respect that
judgment. It gives courts the power to make all manner of
scientific and technical judgments. It gives courts the power to
make all manner of policy calls, including about how to weigh
competing goods and values. (See Chevron itself.) It puts
courts at the apex of the administrative process as to every
conceivable subject—because there are always gaps and ambiguities
in regulatory statutes, and often of great import. What actions can
be taken to address climate change or other environmental
challenges? What will the Nation’s health-care system look like in
the coming decades? Or the financial or transportation systems?
What rules are going to constrain the development of A.I.? In every
sphere of current or future federal regulation, expect courts from
now on to play a commanding role. It is not a role Congress has
given to them, in the APA or any other statute. It is a role this
Court has now claimed for itself, as well as for other judges.

															And that claim requires disrespecting, too, this
Court’s precedent. There are no special reasons, of the kind
usually invoked for overturning precedent, to eliminate Chevron deference. And given Chevron ’s pervasiveness,
the decision to do so is likely to produce large-scale disruption.
All that backs today’s decision is the majority’s belief that Chevron was wrong—that it gave agencies too much power and
courts not enough. But shifting views about the worth of regulatory
actors and their work do not justify overhauling a cornerstone of
administrative law. In that sense too, today’s majority has lost
sight of its proper role.

															And it is impossible to pretend that today’s
decision is a one-off, in either its treatment of agencies or its
treatment of precedent. As to the first, this very Term presents
yet another example of the Court’s resolve to roll back agency
authority, despite congressional direction to the contrary. See SEC v. Jarkesy , 603 U. S. ___ (2024); see also supra , at 3. As to the second, just my own defenses of stare decisis —my own dissents to this Court’s reversals of
settled law—by now fill a small volume. See Dobbs , 597
U. S., at 363–364 (joint opinion of Breyer, Sotomayor, and
Kagan, JJ.); Edwards v. Vannoy , 593 U.S. 255, 296–297
(2021); Knick v. Township of Scott , 588 U.S. 180,
207–208 (2019); Janus , 585 U. S. , at 931–932.
Once again, with respect, I dissent. Notes 1 *Justice Jackson did not
participate in the consideration or decision of the case in No.
22–451 and joins this opinion only as it applies to the case in No.
22–1219. 2 Note that presumptions of
this kind are common in the law. In other contexts, too, the Court
responds to a congressional lack of direction by adopting a
presumption about what Congress wants, rather than trying to figure
that out in every case. And then Congress can legislate, with
“predictable effects,” against that “stable background” rule. Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. , 561 U.S.
247 , 261 (2010). Take the presumption against
extraterritoriality: The Court assumes Congress means for its
statutes to apply only within the United States, absent a “clear
indication” to the contrary. Id. , at 255. Or the presumption
against retroactivity: The Court assumes Congress wants its laws to
apply only prospectively, unless it “unambiguously instruct[s]”
something different. Vartelas v. Holder , 566 U.S.
257 , 266 (2012). Or the presumption against repeal of statutes
by implication: The Court assumes Congress does not intend a later
statute to displace an earlier one unless it makes that intention
“clear and manifest.” Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis ,
584 U.S. 497, 510 (2018). Or the (so far unnamed) presumption
against treating a procedural requirement as “jurisdictional”
unless “Congress clearly states that it is.” Boechler v. Commissioner , 596 U.S. 199, 203 (2022). I could continue,
except that this footnote is long enough. The Chevron deference rule is to the same effect: The Court generally assumes
that Congress intends to confer discretion on agencies to handle
statutory ambiguities or gaps, absent a direction to the contrary.
The majority calls that presumption a “fiction,” ante , at
26, but it is no more so than any of the presumptions listed above.
They all are best guesses—and usually quite good guesses—by courts
about congressional intent. 3 The majority tries to
buttress its argument with a stray sentence or two from the APA’s
legislative history, but the same response holds. As the majority
notes, see ante , at 15, the House and Senate Reports each
stated that Section 706 “provid[ed] that questions of law are for
courts rather than agencies to decide in the last analysis.”
H. R. Rep. No. 1980, 79th Cong., 2d Sess., 44 (1946); S. Rep.
No. 752, 79th Cong., 1st Sess., 28 (1945). But that statement also
does not address the standard of review that courts should then
use. When a court defers under Chevron , it reviews the
agency’s construction for reasonableness “in the last analysis.”
The views of Representative Walter, which the majority also cites,
further demonstrate my point. He stated that the APA would require
courts to “determine independently all relevant questions of law,”
but he also stated that courts would be required to “exercise
. . . independent judgment” in applying the
substantial-evidence standard (a deferential standard if ever there
were one). 92 Cong. Rec. 5654 (1946). He therefore did not equate
“independent” review with de novo review; he thought
that a court could conduct independent review of agency action
using a deferential standard. 4 In a footnote responding
to the last two paragraphs, the majority raises the white flag on
Section 706’s text. See ante , at 15, n. 4. Yes, it
finally concedes, Section 706 does not say that de novo review is required for an agency’s statutory
construction. Rather, the majority says, “some things go without
saying,” and de novo review is such a thing. See ibid. But why? What extra-textual considerations force us to
read Section 706 the majority’s way? In its footnote, the majority
repairs only to history. But as I will explain below, the majority
also gets wrong the most relevant history, pertaining to how
judicial review of agency interpretations operated in the years
before the APA was enacted. See infra , at
19–23. 5 I concede one exception
(whose view was “almost completely isolated,” Levin 181), but his
comments on Section 706 refute a different aspect of the majority’s
argument. Professor John Dickinson, as the majority notes, thought
that Section 706 precluded courts from deferring to agency
interpretations. See Administrative Procedure Act: Scope and
Grounds of Broadened Judicial Review, 33 A. B. A. J. 434, 516
(1947) (Dickinson); ante , at 16. But unlike the majority, he
viewed that bar as “a change” to, not a restatement of, pre-APA
law. Compare Dickinson 516 with ante , at 15–16. So if the
majority really wants to rely on Professor Dickinson, it will have
to give up the claim, which I address below, that the law before
the APA forbade deference. See infra , at 19–23. 6 Because the APA was meant
to “restate[ ] the present law,” the judicial review practices
of the 1940s are more important to understanding the statute than
is any earlier tradition (such as the majority dwells on). But
before I expand on those APA-contemporaneous practices, I pause to
note that they were “not built on sand.” Kisor v. Wilkie , 588 U.S. 558, 568–569 (2019) (plurality opinion).
Since the early days of the Republic, this Court has given
significant weight to official interpretations of “ambiguous
law[s].” Edwards’ Lessee v. Darby , 12 Wheat. 206, 210
(1827). With the passage of time—and the growth of the
administrative sphere—those “judicial expressions of deference
increased.” H. Monaghan, Marbury and the Administrative
State, 83 Colum. L. Rev. 1, 15 (1983). By the early 20th
century, the Court stated that it would afford “great weight” to an
agency construction in the face of statutory “uncertainty or
ambiguity.” National Lead Co. v. United States , 252 U.S.
140 , 145 (1920); see Schell’s Executors v. Fauché , 138 U.S.
562 , 572 (1891) (“controlling” weight in “all cases of
ambiguity”); United States v. Alabama Great Southern R.
Co. , 142 U.S.
615 , 621 (1892) (“decisive” weight “in case of ambiguity”); Jacobs v. Prichard , 223 U.S.
200 , 214 (1912) (referring to the “rule which gives strength”
to official interpretations if “ambiguity exist[s]”). So even
before the New Deal, a strand of this Court’s cases exemplified
deference to executive constructions of ambiguous statutes. And
then, as I show in the text, the New Deal arrived and deference
surged—creating the “present law” that the APA
“restated.” 7 The majority says that I
have “pluck[ed] out” Gray and Hearst , impliedly from
a vast number of not-so-helpful cases. Ante , at 13,
n. 3. It would make as much sense to say that a judge “plucked
out” Universal Camera Corp. v. NLRB , 340 U.S.
474 (1951), to discuss substantial-evidence review or “plucked
out” Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Assn. of United States, Inc. v. State Farm Mut. Automobile Ins. Co. , 463 U.S.
29 (1983), to discuss arbitrary-and-capricious review. Gray and Hearst , as noted above, were the leading
cases about agency interpretations in the years before the APA’s
enactment. But just to gild the lily, here are a number of other
Supreme Court decisions from the five years prior to the APA’s
enactment that were of a piece: United States v. Pierce
Auto Freight Lines, Inc. , 327 U.S.
515 , 536 (1946); ICC v. Parker , 326 U.S.
60 , 65 (1945); Federal Security Administrator v. Quaker Oats Co. , 318 U.S.
218 , 227–228 (1943). The real “pluck[ing]” offense is the
majority’s—for taking a stray sentence from Hearst ( ante , at 13, n. 3) to suggest that both Hearst and Gray stand for the opposite of what they actually
do.

Summary: The Supreme Court considered whether to overrule the Chevron doctrine, which requires courts to defer to federal agencies' interpretations of statutes they administer if the statute is ambiguous. The Court reviewed two cases challenging the same agency rule, where lower courts applied Chevron deference and resolved in favor of the government. The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) claimed exclusive fishery management authority for the US, but the cases focused on the ambiguity of the term "fish." The Court's discussion centered on the history of judicial deference to agency interpretations, concluding that pre-APA cases exemplified deference to executive constructions of ambiguous statutes.