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Page Number: 21

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

13 

Opinion of the Court 

law.”  5 U. S. C. §706.3 

C 
Congress in 1946 enacted the APA “as a check upon ad-
ministrators whose zeal might otherwise have carried them
to  excesses  not  contemplated  in  legislation  creating  their 
offices.”  Morton Salt, 338 U. S., at 644.  It was the culmi-
nation  of  a  “comprehensive  rethinking  of  the  place  of  ad-
ministrative agencies in a regime of separate and divided 
powers.”  Bowen  v.  Michigan  Academy  of  Family  Physi-
cians, 476 U. S. 667, 670–671 (1986). 

In  addition  to  prescribing  procedures  for  agency  action,
the APA delineates the basic contours of judicial review of
such action.  As relevant here, Section 706 directs that “[t]o 

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3 The dissent plucks out Gray, Hearst, and—to “gild the lily,” in its tell-
ing—three more 1940s decisions, claiming they reflect the relevant his-
torical tradition of judicial review.  Post, at 21–22, and n. 6 (opinion of 
KAGAN, J.).  But it has no substantial response to the fact that Gray and 
Hearst themselves endorsed, implicitly in one case and explicitly in the 
next, the traditional rule that “questions of statutory interpretation . . . 
are  for  the  courts  to  resolve,  giving  appropriate  weight”—not  outright 
deference—“to the judgment of those whose special duty is to administer
the questioned statute.”  Hearst, 322 U. S., at 130–131.  And it fails to 
recognize the deep roots that this rule has in our Nation’s judicial tradi-
tion, to the limited extent it engages with that tradition at all.  See post, 
at  20–21,  n. 5.  Instead,  like  the  Government,  it  strains  to  equate  the
“respect” or “weight” traditionally afforded to Executive Branch interpre-
tations with binding deference.  See ibid.; Brief for Respondents in No. 
22–1219,  pp. 21–24.    That  supposed  equivalence  is  a  fiction.   The  dis-
sent’s cases establish that a “contemporaneous construction” shared by 
“not  only  . . .  the  courts”  but  also  “the  departments”  could  be  “control-
ling,” Schell’s Executors v. Fauché, 138 U. S. 562, 572 (1891) (emphasis
added), and that courts might “lean in favor” of a “contemporaneous” and 
“continued” construction of the Executive Branch as strong evidence of a 
statute’s meaning, United States v. Alabama Great Southern R. Co., 142 
U. S. 615, 621 (1892).  They do not establish that Executive Branch in-
terpretations  of  ambiguous  statutes—no  matter  how  inconsistent,  late 
breaking, or flawed—always bound the courts.  In reality, a judge was 
never  “bound  to  adopt  the  construction  given  by  the  head  of  a  depart-
ment.”  Decatur v. Paulding, 14 Pet. 497, 515 (1840).