U.S. Supreme Court, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Secretary of Commerce, Docket No. 22-451

Statutory Interpretation

 

Presumptions

 

Ambiguity

 

 

 

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 “an 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). 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.

 

 

 

 

(U.S. Supreme Court, June 28, 2024, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Secretary of Commerce, Docket No. 22-451, C.J. Roberts)