Elwood Discusses Supreme Court’s Overturning of Chevron Doctrine in Law360

John Elwood, head of the firm’s Appellate and Supreme Court practice, was quoted in the Law360 article, “Chevron's End Is Just The Start For Energized Agency Foes.” The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent overruling of their landmark 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which established the Chevron deference, a doctrine that required federal judges to defer to agency interpretations of vague laws.

Elwood named Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency as one case that illustrated previous desires to weaken federal agencies. In the case, the justices allowed property owners to preemptively challenge the agency’s compliance directives, which Elwood said was “kind of a seminal event in the Roberts court's skepticism of the administrative state.”

Discussing the potential outcomes of the Supreme Court’s decision, Elwood told Law360 that “nondelegation doctrine was moribund and Chevron was preeminent” when he graduated from law school in 1993. “One of those has been switched, and I think that there's a very good chance within five years the other one will be revisited.” He added that there is probably “a good chance that the [Supreme] Court will set stronger limits on Congress' ability to delegate things to the agencies.”

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