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Page Number: 31.0

14 

UNITED STATES v. TEXAS 

 GORSUCH, J., concurring
GORSUCH, J., concurring in judgment 

States 41–42; Harrison, 37 Yale J. Reg. Bull., at 46.  The 
anomaly dissipates, however, if we read §706(2) as instruct-
ing courts about when they must disregard agency action in
the process of deciding a case.

Imagine what else it would mean if §706(2) really did au-
thorize  vacatur.    Ordinary  joinder  and  class-action  proce-
dures  would  become  essentially  irrelevant  in  administra-
tive  litigation.  Why  bother  jumping  through  those  hoops
when a single plaintiff can secure a remedy that rules the 
world?  See Bray, 131 Harv. L. Rev., at 464–465.  Surely,
too,  it  is  odd  that  leading  scholars  who  wrote  extensively 
about the APA after its adoption apparently never noticed 
this supposed remedy.   See J. Harrison, Vacatur of Rules 
Under  the  Administrative  Procedure  Act,  40  Yale  J.  Reg. 
Bull. 119, 127–128 (2023) (discussing scholarship of Profes-
sors Kenneth Culp Davis and Louis Jaffe); see also Depart-
ment of Justice, Attorney General’s Manual on the Admin-
istrative Procedure Act 108 (1947) (offering the Executive
Branch’s view that §706 simply “restates the present law as
to the scope of judicial review”).  These are not people who
would have missed such a major development in their field. 

C 
As always, there are arguments on the other side of the
ledger, and the States tee up several.  They first reply that
§706(2)  must  allow  vacatur  of  agency  action  because  the 
APA  models  judicial  review  of  agency  action  on  appellate 
review  of  judgments,  and  appellate  courts  sometimes  va-
cate judgments.  Brief for Respondents 40.  But just because
“Congress may sometimes refer to collateral judicial review 
of  executive  action  as  ‘an  appeal’  . . .  does  not  make  it  an 
‘appeal’  akin  to  that  taken  from  the  district  court  to  the 
court of appeals.”  Garland v. Ming Dai, 593 U. S. ___, ___ 
(2021) (slip op., at 9).  Nor does any of that tell us in which
respects the APA models judicial review of agency action on
appellate review of lower court judgments.  According to one