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Page Number: 109.0

28 

LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES v. RAIMONDO 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

And Chevron is an especially puzzling decision to criticize
on the ground of generating too much judicial divergence. 
There’s good empirical—meaning, non-impressionistic—ev-
idence on exactly that subject.  And it shows that, as com-
pared  with  de novo  review,  use  of  the  Chevron  two-step
framework  fosters  agreement  among  judges.  See  K.  Bar-
nett, C. Boyd, & C. Walker, Administrative Law’s Political
Dynamics,  71  Vand.  L. Rev.  1463,  1502  (2018)  (Barnett). 
More particularly, Chevron has a “powerful constraining ef-
fect  on  partisanship  in  judicial  decisionmaking.”    Barnett 
1463  (italics  deleted);  see  Sunstein  1672  (“[A]  predictable
effect of overruling Chevron would be to ensure a far greater
role for judicial policy preferences in statutory interpreta-
tion  and  far  more  common  splits  along  ideological  lines”). 
So  if  consistency  among  judges  is  the  majority’s  lodestar,
then the Court should not overrule Chevron, but return to 
using it.

The majority’s second theory on workability is likewise a
makeweight.    Chevron,  the  majority  complains,  has  some 
exceptions, which (so the majority says) are “difficult” and 
“complicate[d]” to apply.  Ante, at 32.  Recall that courts are 
not supposed to defer when the agency construing a statute 
(1) has not been charged with administering that law; (2)
has not used deliberative procedures—i.e., notice-and-com-
ment rulemaking or adjudication; or (3) is intervening in a
“major  question,”  of  great  economic  and  political  signifi-
cance.  See  supra,  at  11–12;  ante,  at  27–28.  As  I’ve  ex-
plained,  those  exceptions—the  majority  also  aptly  calls
them “refinements”—fit with Chevron’s rationale: They de-
fine  circumstances  in  which  Congress  is  unlikely  to  have
wanted agency views to govern.  Ante, at 27; see supra, at 
11–12.  And on the difficulty scale, they are nothing much.
Has Congress put the agency in charge of administering the 
statute?  In 99 of 100 cases, everyone will agree on the an-
swer with scarcely a moment’s thought.  Did the agency use 
notice-and-comment or an adjudication before rendering an