In June 2024, the Supreme Court delivered what many saw as a seismic shock to American administrative law. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court bluntly declared that “Chevron is overruled,” bringing to an end 40 years of judicial deference to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes.

The overruling of Chevron was not a surprise. For years, individual justices had taken potshots at the doctrine, and the Court had conspicuously avoided applying it in recent years. What was surprising was how the Court chose to dismantle it: by formally overruling Chevron while preserving facets of the old regime that had allowed agencies to prevail. Indeed, the most striking thing about Loper Bright may be how much it preserved rather than destroyed.

Chevron’s Arc

To understand where we’re headed, it helps to remember where we’ve been. When the Court decided Chevron in 1984, it seemed to offer administrative law what it badly needed: a “simple and readily comprehensible formula” for deciding when courts should defer to agency interpretations. If a statute was clear, courts would enforce that clear meaning. If it was ambiguous, courts would defer to reasonable agency interpretations.

But that appealing simplicity crumbled over time. The two-step test became what I have called a “minuet”—an intricate dance of exceptions, qualifications, and subsidiary doctrines. The recent addition of a newly muscular major questions doctrine was the bale of hay that broke the camel’s back.

Most importantly, the “politics of deference” shifted dramatically. Chevron started as a conservative doctrine, championed as a tool for Reagan-era deregulation. But as administrative power became associated with liberal governance, conservative opposition coalesced. By 2020, Chevron faced sustained attack from what the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule has described as “a well-funded network of libertarian paralegal institutions” that were deeply distrustful of the administrative state. And in some quarters, Chevron came to be seen as fundamentally unfair, creating a systematic bias in favor of the government that seemed particularly troubling in cases affecting individual rights.

A Fresh Start?

Loper Bright responded to these pressures by overruling Chevron, but the Court’s new framework contains remarkable ambivalences. The decision abolishes deference but preserves delegation. It rejects automatic judicial submission to agency views but requires “due respect” for agency expertise. It demands that courts discern the “best” interpretation of statutes while acknow-ledging that agencies may possess considerable power to “give meaning” to statutory terms. Indeed, Loper Bright cited approvingly numerous statutes that delegate broad authority to agencies—laws that allow agencies to specify which employees must receive minimum wage, to require firms to report safety hazards, and to regulate pollution according to the agency’s determination of what rules are “appropriate” or “necessary.” These are not narrow or technical delegations; they involve exactly the kind of policy choices that critics of the administrative state find most troubling.

The Court also preserved thousands of prior decisions that relied on Chevron, declaring that “we do not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework.” This carve-out means that Loper Bright is simultaneously “a tombstone no one can miss,” as Justice Gorsuch put it, and thousands of missing tombstones.

“What was surprising was how the Court chose to dismantle it: by formally overruling Chevron while preserving facets of the old regime that had allowed agencies to prevail. Indeed, the most striking thing about Loper Bright may be how much it preserved rather than destroyed.”

Professor Mila Sohoni

Those who hope to read Loper Bright as an evisceration of agency power may be disappointed. As Justice Gorsuch observed in his Gundy v. United States dissent, “When one legal doctrine becomes unavailable to do its intended work, the hydraulic pressures of our constitutional system sometimes shift the responsibility to different doctrines.” Agency authority that once flowed through the Chevron deference channel may now flow through the Loper Bright delegation channel instead.

This sort of hydraulic adaptation is not unusual. When the Court in recent years narrowed corporations’ exposure to general personal jurisdiction, it correspondingly loosened doctrines of specific personal jurisdiction. When substantive due process protections for liberty of contract became untenable, similar results sometimes found a footing in the protections of the First Amendment. Legal doctrine often evolves to preserve outcomes even when the formal frameworks change.

The same hydraulic dynamic may well operate here. Courts applying Loper Bright can legitimately conclude that the “best reading” of a statute is that Congress gave substantial interpretive authority to an agency and the agency correctly exercised that authority. The fact that such a conclusion resembles what Chevron would have produced is not a reason to avoid it—it may simply reflect that, in a system premised on legislative supremacy, Congress can legitimately choose to designate agencies, rather than courts, as the entities that will “give meaning” to statutes.

Lessons from Chevron’s Demise

What does the future hold for Loper Bright? If its framework is to prove more durable than its ill-starred predecessor, the Court must learn from Chevron’s downfall. Three factors ultimately doomed Chevron: It became unworkable, it was seen as unfair, and it lost political legitimacy.

The Court must ensure that Loper Bright avoids the same fate. That means providing clearer guidance on how the new framework operates in practice, before courts and scholars rush to create new reticulated schemes of multistep tests and doctrinal boxes to implement it. It means ensuring that the framework produces fair results for both agencies and challengers to agency action, rather than systematically favoring either side. And it means applying the framework evenhandedly across administrations, regardless of which political party happens to be in power.

The last point may prove most challenging, for Loper Bright faces the mirror-image risk that brought down Chevron. If it comes to be seen as a partisan tool that constrains Democratic administrations while giving free rein to Republican ones, it may someday face the same kind of sustained political opposition that Chevron ultimately could not survive.

Loper Bright represents not just the end of the Chevron era but the beginning of a new experiment in allocating power between courts and agencies. Whether Loper Bright will stand the test of time will depend on whether the Court has learned the right lessons from Chevron’s saga. Unlike the Chevron Court, which decided that case with little inkling of the monumental importance of the doctrine they were creating, the Loper Bright Court knew exactly what it was doing. These justices understood they were dismantling a foundational precedent and replacing it with a new framework that would govern countless future cases. That awareness brings with it responsibility. Having torn down Chevron, the Court must ensure that its replacement is built to last. If the Court absorbs the lessons of Chevron’s demise as it develops the Loper Bright framework, then that may prove to be Chevron’s most enduring legacy. SL

This piece draws substantially in both content and wording from Mila Sohoni, Chevron’s Legacy, 138 Harv. L. Rev. F. 66 (2025).