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18 

LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES v. RAIMONDO 

Opinion of the Court 

discretionary authority to an agency, the role of the review-
ing court under the APA is, as always, to independently in-
terpret the statute and effectuate the will of Congress sub-
ject to constitutional limits.  The court fulfills that role by 
recognizing constitutional delegations, “fix[ing] the bound-
aries of [the] delegated authority,” H. Monaghan, Marbury
and  the  Administrative  State,  83  Colum.  L. Rev.  1,  27 
(1983), and ensuring the agency has engaged in “ ‘reasoned 
decisionmaking’ ”  within  those  boundaries,  Michigan,  576 
U. S., at 750 (quoting Allentown Mack Sales & Service, Inc. 
v. NLRB, 522 U. S. 359, 374 (1998)); see also Motor Vehicle 
Mfrs. Assn. of United States, Inc. v. State Farm Mut. Auto-
mobile Ins. Co., 463 U. S. 29 (1983).  By doing so, a court
upholds  the  traditional  conception  of  the  judicial  function 
that the APA adopts. 

III 
The deference that Chevron requires of courts reviewing

agency action cannot be squared with the APA. 

A 

In  the  decades  between  the  enactment  of  the  APA  and 
this Court’s decision in Chevron, courts generally continued
to review agency interpretations of the statutes they admin-
ister by independently examining each statute to determine 
its meaning.  Cf. T. Merrill, Judicial Deference to Executive 
Precedent, 101 Yale L. J. 969, 972–975 (1992).  As an early 
proponent  (and  later  critic)  of  Chevron  recounted,  courts 
during this period thus identified delegations of discretion-
ary authority to agencies on a “statute-by-statute basis.”  A. 
Scalia,  Judicial  Deference  to  Administrative  Interpreta-
tions of Law, 1989 Duke L. J. 511, 516. 

Chevron,  decided  in  1984  by  a  bare  quorum  of  six  Jus-
tices, triggered a marked departure from the traditional ap-
proach.  The question in the case was whether an EPA reg-
ulation  “allow[ing]  States  to  treat  all  of  the  pollution-