WASHINGTON (CN) - Shielding one of the most fundamental tenets of administrative law, the Supreme Court refused Wednesday to overhaul the standard by which courts defer to agency interpretations of their own ambiguous regulations.
Known as Auer deference, the core doctrine of administrative law says courts should defer to agencies' interpretations of their own ambiguous regulations so long as the interpretation was not "plainly erroneous or inconsistent."
Drawing its name from a 1997 decision, the deference has been the target of conservatives who say it presents separation-of-powers concerns and gives too much power to administrative agencies.
In a highly fractured opinion this morning, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal members of the Supreme Court to keep the standard in place.
"Auer deference retains an important role in construing agency regulations," Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the plurality. "But even as we uphold it, we reinforce its limits. Auer deference is sometimes appropriate and sometimes not. Whether to apply it depends on a range of considerations that we have noted now and again, but compile and further develop today. The deference doctrine we describe is potent in its place, but cabined in its scope. On remand, the Court of Appeals should decide whether it applies to the agency interpretation at issue."
Kagan cited the doctrine of stare decisis, under which the court is reluctant to overturn its past decisions, in upholding the deference. She said James Kisor, the veteran who asked the justices to toss out Auer, did not give them a good enough reason for doing so.
"Kisor fails at the first step: None of his arguments provide good reason to doubt Auer deference," Kagan wrote. "And even if that were not so, Kisor does not offer the kind of special justification needed to overrule Auer, and Seminole Rock, and all our many other decisions deferring to reasonable agency constructions of ambiguous rules."
Even with Auer, Kagan noted that courts still have a meaningful ability to review agency decisions. Kagan also pushed aside the claim that the deference incentivizes agencies to issue vague regulations, saying there is "no real evidence" that agencies behave in such a way.
Finally, Kagan noted the lower courts have wielded Auer deference "thousands of times,” and that doing away with it would raise questions about the underlying regulations upheld in those cases.
While sparing the doctrine, Kagan spent nearly eight pages of her opinion discussing its limits, seeking to "restate, and somewhat expand on," the limits of the deference in an effort to "clear up some mixed messages we have sent."
"As we explain in this section, the possibility of deference can arise only if a regulation is genuinely ambiguous," Kagan wrote. "And when we use that term, we mean it — genuinely ambiguous, even after a court has resorted to all the standard tools of interpretation."
