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Page Number: 17.0

14

PEREZ v. MORTGAGE BANKERS ASSN. 

Opinion of the Court 

C 

MBA  changes  direction  in  the  second  half  of  its  brief, 
contending  that  if  the  Court  overturns  the  Paralyzed 
Veterans  rule,  the  D. C.  Circuit’s  judgment  should  none-
theless  be  affirmed.    That  is  so,  MBA  says,  because  the 
agency  interpretation  at  issue—the  2010  Administrator’s 
Interpretation—should in fact be classified as a legislative 
rule. 

We  will  not  address  this  argument.    From  the  begin-
ning,  the  parties  litigated  this  suit  on  the  understanding
that  the  Administrator’s  Interpretation  was—as  its  name 
suggests—an  interpretive  rule.    Indeed,  if  MBA  did  not 
think the Administrator’s Interpretation was an interpre-
tive  rule,  then  its  decision  to  invoke  the  Paralyzed  Veter-
ans  doctrine  in  attacking  the  rule  is  passing  strange.
After  all,  Paralyzed  Veterans  applied  only  to  interpretive 
rules.  Consequently,  neither  the  District  Court  nor  the
D. C.  Circuit  considered  MBA’s  current  claim  that  the 
Administrator’s  Interpretation  is  actually  a  legislative 
rule.  Beyond that, and more important still, MBA’s brief
in  opposition  to  certiorari  did  not  dispute  petitioners’ 
assertions—in their framing of the question presented and 
in  the  substance  of  their  petitions—that  the  Administra-
tor’s  Interpretation  is  an  interpretive  rule.    Thus,  even 
assuming  MBA  did  not  waive  the  argument  below,  it  has 
done so in this Court.  See this Court’s Rule 15.2; Carcieri 
v. Salazar, 555 U. S. 379, 395–396 (2009).

* 

* 
For  the  foregoing  reasons,  the  judgment  of  the  United
States  Court  of  Appeals  for  the  District  of  Columbia  Cir-
cuit is reversed. 

* 

It is so ordered.