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Page Number: 63

16 

LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES v. RAIMONDO 

GORSUCH, J., concurring 

construction  of  an  “ambiguous”  law  that  an  executive 
agency might offer.  It did not mean that the government 
could  propound  a  “reasonable”  view  of  the  law’s  meaning 
one day, a different one the next, and bind the judiciary al-
ways to its latest word.  Nor did it mean the executive could 
displace  a  pre-existing  judicial  construction  of  a  statute’s 
terms, replace it with its own, and effectively overrule a ju-
dicial precedent in the process.  Put simply, this Court was 
“not bound” by any and all reasonable “administrative con-
struction[s]”  of  ambiguous  statutes  when  resolving  cases
and controversies.  Burnet v. Chicago Portrait Co., 285 U. S. 
1, 16 (1932).  While the executive’s consistent and contem-
poraneous views warranted respect, they “by no means con-
trol[led] the action or the opinion of this court in expound-
ing the law with reference to the rights of parties litigant
before them.”  Irvine v. Marshall, 20 How. 558, 567 (1858);
see also A. Bamzai, The Origins of Judicial Deference to Ex-
ecutive Interpretation, 126 Yale L. J. 908, 987 (2017). 

Sensing how jarringly inconsistent Chevron is with this 
Court’s  many  longstanding  precedents  discussing  the  na-
ture of the judicial role in disputes over the law’s meaning,
the  government  and  dissent  struggle  for  a  response.  The 
best they can muster is a handful of cases from the early
1940s in which, they say, this Court first “put [deference]
principles into action.”  Post, at 21 (KAGAN, J., dissenting). 
And, admittedly, for a period this Court toyed with a form
of  deference  akin  to  Chevron,  at  least  for  so-called  mixed 
questions  of  law  and  fact.  See,  e.g.,  Gray  v.  Powell,  314 
U. S.  402,  411–412  (1941);  NLRB  v.  Hearst  Publications, 
Inc., 322 U. S. 111, 131 (1944).  But, as the Court details, 
even that limited experiment did not last.  See ante, at 10– 
12.  Justice Roberts, in his Gray dissent, decried these de-
cisions for “abdicat[ing our] function as a court of review”
and  “complete[ly]  revers[ing]  . . .  the  normal  and  usual 
method  of  construing  a  statute.”    314  U. S.,  at  420–421. 
And just a few years later, in Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323