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Page Number: 102.0

Cite as:  603 U. S. ____ (2024) 

21 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

Two prominent Supreme Court decisions of the 1940s put 
those principles into action.  Gray v. Powell, 314 U. S. 402 
(1941), was then widely understood as “the leading case” on 
review of agency interpretations.  Davis 882; see ibid. (not-
ing that it “establish[ed] what is known as ‘the doctrine of 
Gray v. Powell’ ”).  There, the Court deferred to an agency 
construction of the term “producer” as used in a statutory 
exemption  from  price  controls.  Congress,  the  Court  ex-
plained, had committed the scope of the exemption to the 
agency because its “experience in [the] field gave promise of 
a  better  informed,  more  equitable,  adjustment  of  the  con-
flicting interests.”  Gray, 314 U. S., at 412.  Accordingly, the
Court concluded that it was “not the province of a court” to 
“substitute  its  judgment”  for  the  agency’s.  Ibid.  Three 
years later, the Court decided NLRB v. Hearst Publications, 
Inc., 322 U. S. 111 (1944), another acknowledged “leading 
case.”  Davis 882; see id., at 884.  The Court again deferred,
this time to an agency’s construction of the term “employee” 
in  the  National  Labor  Relations  Act.  The  scope  of  that
term, the Court explained, “belong[ed] to” the agency to an-
swer based on its “[e]veryday experience in the administra-
tion of the statute.”  Hearst, 322 U. S., at 130.  The Court 
therefore “limited” its review to whether the agency’s read-
ing  had  “warrant  in  the  record  and  a  reasonable  basis  in 

—————— 
the  early  20th  century,  the  Court  stated  that  it  would  afford  “great
weight” to an agency construction in the face of statutory “uncertainty or
ambiguity.”    National  Lead  Co.  v.  United  States,  252  U. S.  140,  145 
(1920); see Schell’s Executors v. Fauché, 138 U. S. 562, 572 (1891) (“con-
trolling”  weight  in  “all  cases  of  ambiguity”);  United  States  v.  Alabama 
Great Southern R. Co., 142 U. S. 615, 621 (1892) (“decisive” weight “in 
case of ambiguity”); Jacobs v. Prichard, 223 U. S. 200, 214 (1912) (refer-
ring to the “rule which gives strength” to official interpretations if “am-
biguity exist[s]”).  So even before the New Deal, a strand of this Court’s 
cases exemplified deference to executive constructions of ambiguous stat-
utes.  And then, as I show in the text, the New Deal arrived and deference 
surged—creating the “present law” that the APA “restated.”