Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 666.0

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Unit: $U53

[09-26-01 10:37:28] PAGES PGT: OPIN

Cite as: 529 U. S. 576 (2000)

591

Opinion of Scalia, J.

Drug Administration’s “longstanding interpretation of the
statute,” reﬂected in no-action notice published in the Fed-
eral Register).

In my view, therefore, the position that the county’s action
in this case was unlawful unless permitted by the terms of
an agreement with the sheriff ’s department employees war-
rants Chevron deference if it represents the authoritative
view of the Department of Labor. The fact that it appears
in a single opinion letter signed by the Acting Administrator
of the Wage and Hour Division might not alone persuade me
that it occupies that status. But the Solicitor General of the
United States, appearing as an amicus in this action, has
ﬁled a brief, cosigned by the Solicitor of Labor, which repre-
sents the position set forth in the opinion letter to be the
position of the Secretary of Labor. That alone, even without
existence of the opinion letter, would in my view entitle the
position to Chevron deference. What we said in a case in-
volving an agency’s interpretation of its own regulations ap-
plies equally, in my view, to an agency’s interpretation of its
governing statute:

“Petitioners complain that the Secretary’s interpreta-
tion comes to us in the form of a legal brief; but that
does not, in the circumstances of this case, make it un-
worthy of deference. The Secretary’s position is in no
sense a ‘post hoc rationalizatio[n]’ advanced by an
agency seeking to defend past agency action against
attack, Bowen v. Georgetown Univ. Hospital, 488 U. S.
204, 212 (1988). There is simply no reason to suspect
that the interpretation does not reﬂect the agency’s fair
and considered judgment on the matter in question.”
Auer v. Robbins, 519 U. S. 452, 462 (1997).

I nonetheless join the judgment of the Court because, for
the reasons set forth in Part II of its opinion, the Secretary’s
position does not seem to me a reasonable interpretation of
the statute.