Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf
Page Number: 99.0

18 

LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES v. RAIMONDO 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

And contra the majority, most “respected commentators”
understood  Section  706  in  that  way—as  allowing,  even  if 
not requiring, deference.  Ante, at 16.  The finest adminis-
trative law scholars of the time (call them that generation’s 
Manning, Sunstein, and Vermeule) certainly did.  Professor 
Louis Jaffe described something very like the Chevron two-
step as the preferred method of reviewing agency interpre-
tations under the APA.  A court, he said, first “must decide 
as  a  ‘question  of  law’  whether  there  is  ‘discretion’  in  the 
premises.”  Judicial  Control  of  Administrative  Action  570 
(1965).  That is akin to step 1: Did Congress speak to the
issue, or did it leave openness?  And if the latter, Jaffe con-
tinued, the agency’s view “if ‘reasonable’ is free of control.” 
Ibid.  That of course looks like step 2: defer if reasonable.
And just in case that description was too complicated, Jaffe 
conveyed  his  main  point  this  way:  The  argument  that
courts “must decide all questions of law”—as if there were
no agency in the picture—“is, in my opinion, unsound.”  Id., 
at 569.  Similarly, Professor Kenneth Culp Davis, author of
the then-preeminent treatise on administrative law, noted 
with approval that “reasonableness” review of agency inter-
pretations—in  which  courts  “refused  to  substitute  judg-
ment”—had “survived the APA.”  Administrative Law 880, 
883, 885 (1951) (Davis).  Other contemporaneous scholars 
and experts agreed.  See R. Levin, The APA and the Assault 
on  Deference,  106  Minn.  L.  Rev.  125,  181–183  (2021) 
(Levin)  (listing  many  of  them).  They  did  not  see  in  their 
own time what the majority finds there today.4 
—————— 
But as I will explain below, the majority also gets wrong the most rele-
vant history, pertaining to how judicial review of agency interpretations 
operated in the years before the APA was enacted.  See infra, at 19–23. 
4 I concede one exception (whose view was “almost completely isolated,”
Levin 181), but his comments on Section 706 refute a different aspect of
the  majority’s  argument.    Professor  John  Dickinson,  as  the  majority 
notes,  thought  that  Section  706  precluded  courts  from  deferring  to 
agency  interpretations.    See  Administrative  Procedure  Act:  Scope  and
Grounds  of  Broadened  Judicial  Review,  33  A.  B.  A.  J.  434,  516  (1947)