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28 

LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES v. RAIMONDO 

GORSUCH, J., concurring 

directions.”  Kagan 212–213.  “[T]he quality of the reason-
ing,” they acknowledge, “was not high,” C. Sunstein, Chev-
ron as Law, 107 Geo. L. J. 1613, 1669 (2019). 

If Chevron meant to usher in a revolution in how judges
interpret  laws,  no  one  appears  to  have  realized  it  at  the 
time.  Chevron’s author, Justice Stevens, characterized the 
decision as a “simpl[e] . . . restatement of existing law, noth-
ing more or less.”  Merrill 255, 275.  In the “19 argued cases”
in the following Term “that presented some kind of question 
about whether the Court should defer to an agency inter-
pretation  of  statutory  law,”  this  Court  cited  Chevron  just 
once.  Merrill 276.  By some accounts, the decision seemed
“destined to obscurity.”  Ibid. 

It was only three years later when Justice Scalia wrote a 
concurrence  that  a  revolution  began  to  take  shape.    Buff-
ington, 598 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 8).  There, he argued
for a new rule requiring courts to defer to executive agency
interpretations of the law whenever a “ ‘statute is silent or
ambiguous.’ ”    NLRB  v.  Food  &  Commercial  Workers, 
484 U. S. 112, 133–134 (1987) (opinion of Scalia, J.).  Even-
tually, a majority of the Court followed his lead.  Buffington, 
598 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 8).  But from the start, Justice 
Scalia made no secret about the scope of his ambitions.  See 
Judicial  Deference  to  Administrative  Interpretations  of
Law, 1989 Duke L. J. 511, 521 (1989) (Scalia).  The rule he 
advocated  for  represented  such  a  sharp  break  from  prior
practice, he explained, that many judges of his day didn’t 
yet  “understand”  the  “old  criteria”  were  “no  longer  rele-
vant.”  Ibid.  Still, he said, overthrowing the past was worth 
it because a new deferential rule would be “easier to follow.” 
Ibid. 

Events proved otherwise.  As the years wore on and the
Court’s  new  and  aggressive  reading  of  Chevron  gradually
exposed itself as unworkable, unfair, and at odds with our 
separation  of  powers,  Justice  Scalia  could  have  doubled 
down  on  the  project.  But  he  didn’t.    He  appreciated  that