The Supreme Court handed small fishing companies a victory Friday in their lawsuits against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), overturning a decades-old precedent that expanded the power of the administrative state.
Siding 6-3 with the fishermen, the Supreme Court reversed its 1984 landmark case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which lower courts relied on to uphold NOAA’s rule forcing companies to doll out $700 per day — around 20% of their revenue — t0 pay the salaries of federally mandated on-board observers. The principle of Chevron deference, rooted in the landmark case, instructed courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of statutes when the language is ambiguous.
“Chevron is overruled,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority ruling. “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the [Administrative Procedure Act] requires.”
Small fishing companies sued NOAA after the agency required businesses to pay for the on-board monitors based on its interpretation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), the law governing fishery management. In both Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, lower courts deferred to the agency’s interpretation of the law, citing the Chevron ruling.
Roberts called Chevron a “a judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties.”
“Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” Roberts wrote. “Courts do.”
Critics of Chevron argued the doctrine, in practice, enabled agencies to assert their interpretations of the law without resistance from the judiciary, giving the government the automatic upper hand when challenged in court and raising significant separation-of-powers concerns.
New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA) highlighted the burden NOAA’s rule placed on businesses in an amicus brief. The short training sea monitors receive does not equip them for the rough conditions on board, the association argued, creating safety concerns and forcing crews to shoulder the burden.
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