Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf
Page Number: 7

Cite as:  603 U. S. ____ (2024) 

7 

Syllabus 

By forcing courts to instead pretend that ambiguities are necessarily 
delegations, Chevron prevents judges from judging.  Pp. 23–26. 

(4) Because  Chevron’s  justifying  presumption  is,  as  Members  of 
the Court have often recognized, a fiction, the Court has spent the bet-
ter part of four decades imposing one limitation on Chevron after an-
other.  Confronted with the byzantine set of preconditions and excep-
tions that has resulted, some courts have simply bypassed Chevron or 
failed to heed its various steps and nuances.  The Court, for its part, 
has  not  deferred  to  an  agency  interpretation  under  Chevron  since 
2016.  But because Chevron remains on the books, litigants must con-
tinue to wrestle with it, and lower courts—bound by even the Court’s 
crumbling precedents—understandably continue to apply it.  At best, 
Chevron has been a distraction from the question that matters: Does
the statute authorize the challenged agency action?  And at worst, it 
has  required  courts  to  violate  the  APA  by  yielding  to  an  agency  the 
express  responsibility,  vested  in  “the  reviewing  court,”  to  “decide  all 
relevant  questions  of  law”  and  “interpret  . . .  statutory  provisions.” 
§706 (emphasis added).  Pp. 26–29. 

(d) Stare decisis, the doctrine governing judicial adherence to prece-
dent, does not require the Court to persist in the Chevron project.  The 
stare  decisis  considerations  most  relevant  here—“the  quality  of  [the 
precedent’s] reasoning, the workability of the rule it established, . . . 
and  reliance  on  the  decision,”  Knick  v.  Township  of  Scott,  588  U. S. 
180, 203 (quoting Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees, 
585 U. S. 878, 917)—all weigh in favor of letting Chevron go. 

Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided.  It reshaped ju-
dicial  review  of  agency  action  without  grappling  with  the  APA,  the 
statute that lays out how such review works.  And its flaws were ap-
parent from the start, prompting the Court to revise its foundations 
and continually limit its application. 

Experience has also shown that Chevron is unworkable.  The defin-
ing feature of its framework is the identification of statutory ambigu-
ity, but the concept of ambiguity has always evaded meaningful defi-
nition.  Such an impressionistic and malleable concept “cannot stand 
as  an  every-day  test  for  allocating”  interpretive  authority  between 
courts and agencies.  Swift & Co. v. Wickham, 382 U. S. 111, 125.  The 
Court has also been forced to clarify the doctrine again and again, only 
adding  to  Chevron’s  unworkability,  and  the  doctrine  continues  to 
spawn difficult threshold questions that promise to further complicate 
the inquiry should Chevron be retained.  And its continuing import is
far from clear, as courts have often declined to engage with the doc-
trine, saying it makes no difference.

Nor  has  Chevron  fostered meaningful  reliance.    Given  the  Court’s 
constant  tinkering  with  and  eventual  turn  away  from  Chevron,  it  is