Opinion ID: 171411
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Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Does the Principle of Brand X Apply When the Prior Judicial Interpretation Was By the Supreme Court?

Text: Mr. Hernandez-Carrera and Mr. Hernandez-Arenado first contend that the Supreme Court's construction of § 1231(a)(6) in Zadvydas and Martinez forecloses any subsequent, contrary interpretation by the Attorney General. Similarly, the district court concluded that  Zadvydas and Martinez decide the constitutional extent of the Attorney General's authority under 8 U.S.C. § 1231(a)(6). Hernandez-Carrera, 546 F.Supp.2d at 1190. This misapprehends, however, the relative roles of courts and agencies when interpreting ambiguities in statutory delegations of power to agencies. The Supreme Court held in Chevron that ambiguities in statutes within an agency's jurisdiction to administer are delegations of authority to the agency to fill the statutory gap in reasonable fashion. Brand X, 545 U.S. at 980, 125 S.Ct. 2688 (describing Chevron's holding). Judicial deference to administrative interpretations in these cases is not a policy choice, but rather a means of giving effect to congressional intent. When Congress leaves a gap within a statute administered by an agency, Congress impliedly entrusts the agency with authority to explain and fill in the interstices. Where, as here, Congress has expressly authorized an agency to engage in rulemaking, we will infer that Congress has delegated authority to the agency to address statutory ambiguities. See United States v. Mead Corp., 533 U.S. 218, 229, 121 S.Ct. 2164, 150 L.Ed.2d 292 (2001). In such cases, we recognize that Congress would expect the agency to be able to speak with the force of law when it addresses ambiguity in the statute or fills a space in the enacted law, even one about which Congress did not actually have an intent as to a particular result. Id. In Chevron, the Supreme Court deferred to an agency's resolution of a statutory ambiguity, finalized through notice-and-comment rulemaking, before the Court had an opportunity to construe the statute. Here, the aliens urge us not to defer to an agency construction because it was developed only after the Supreme Court had construed the statute in a contrary manner. As the Supreme Court noted in Brand X, however, whether Congress has delegated to an agency the authority to interpret a statute does not depend on the order in which the judicial and administrative constructions occur. Brand X, 545 U.S. at 983, 125 S.Ct. 2688. Were we to favor a judicial construction over a reasonable administrative agency construction in this case, we would be ignoring Congress' choice to empower an agency, rather than the courts, to resolve this kind of statutory ambiguity. When a court tentatively resolves an ambiguity in a statute that an agency is empowered to administer, such a resolution carries the force of law until an agency issues a definitive interpretation of the kind that would ordinarily warrant Chevron deference. This does not make judicial decisions subject to reversal by executive officers. Brand X, 545 U.S. at 982, 125 S.Ct. 2688. The court's precedent has not been `reversed' by the agency, any more than a federal court's interpretation of a State's law can be said to have been `reversed' by a state court that adopts a conflicting (yet authoritative) interpretation of state law. Id. at 983-84, 125 S.Ct. 2688. Mr. Hernandez-Carrera and Mr. Hernandez-Arenado argue that Brand X only applies to lower court decisions. Aple Br. 22. We disagree. It is true, of course, that Brand X itself involved the question of whether the Ninth Circuit'srather than the Supreme Court'sprior judicial construction of the Communications Act foreclosed a subsequent agency interpretation. See Brand X, 545 U.S. 967, 982, 125 S.Ct. 2688, 162 L.Ed.2d 820 (2005). But we see no reason why the holding in Brand X would not be equally applicable to agency constructions that displace tentative Supreme Court interpretations. In both cases, a court is merely giving due weight to Congress' intent to vest an agency with the power to fill in the gaps within its own statute. The aliens contend that [a] different rule for Supreme Court precedents can be justified on the grounds that these opinion[s] have uniformity, publicity, and finality that are lacking in the lower courts. Aple Br. 22. But even if we assumed that there existed policy reasons to treat Supreme Court and lower court precedents differently in the face of contrary agency interpretations, we would not be free to do so. Chevron deference is not a policy choice subject to balancing against other policy considerations; it is a means of giving effect to congressional intent. The aliens also rely on Justice Stevens' concurrence in Brand X. While agreeing that an agency's interpretation is not foreclosed by a lower court's prior construction, Justice Stevens suggested that the majority's reasoning would not necessarily be applicable to a decision by [the Supreme Court] that would presumably remove any pre-existing ambiguity. Brand X, 545 U.S. at 1003, 125 S.Ct. 2688 (Stevens, J., concurring). The government suggests that Justice Stevens' concurrence should be understood only to affirm the basic point that a Supreme Court determination that a statute is unambiguous binds the lower courts. Aplt. Reply Br. 7 n. 1. That said, some commentators have understood Justice Stevens to have reserved judgment on the question of whether Brand X 's core holding would apply to an agency interpretation that conflicted with an existing Supreme Court construction of a statutory ambiguity. See, e.g., Kathryn A. Watts, Adapting to Administrative Law's Erie Doctrine, 101 Nw. U.L. REV. 997, 1000 n. 19 (2007). Even if we understood Justice Stevens' concurrence to suggest that this question remains open, we would find unpersuasive the argument that Brand X applies to lower courts, but not to the Supreme Court. All of the anomalous results that would have followed from a contrary holding in Brand X would follow equally from a contrary holding in this case. See Brand X, 545 U.S. at 983-84, 125 S.Ct. 2688. For instance, whether an agency's construction would be entitled to Chevron deference could turn on the happenstance of whether the Supreme Court construed the statute before the agency completed notice-and-comment rulemaking proceedings. This would produce a detrimental race between agency and courthouse. Entities that stood to lose from an agency's resolution of statutory ambiguities might pursue a definitive, favorable construction in the Supreme Court, while working to delay the agency from issuing a contrary, unfavorable interpretation entitled to Chevron deference. In addition, the rule advanced by Mr. Hernandez-Carrera and Mr. Hernandez-Arenado would lead to the ossification of large portions of our statutory law, by precluding agencies from revising unwise judicial constructions of ambiguous statutes. See id. at 983, 125 S.Ct. 2688 (quoting Mead, 533 U.S. at 247, 121 S.Ct. 2164 (Scalia, J., dissenting)). Finally, the aliens' rule would disregard the central premise of both Chevron and Brand X: that consistent with congressional intent in these cases, it is for agencies, not courts, to fill statutory gaps. Id. at 983, 125 S.Ct. 2688. For all these reasons, we conclude that the holding of Brand X applies whether the judicial precedent at issue is that of a lower court or the Supreme Court. In sum, a court'seven the Supreme Court'sprior interpretation of a statute that an agency is empowered to administer forecloses an agency's reasonable construction only if the relevant judicial decision held the statute to be unambiguous. See id. at 984, 125 S.Ct. 2688. Because the Supreme Court explicitly found 8 U.S.C. § 1231(a)(6) to be ambiguous, a contrary reasonable agency interpretation is not foreclosed in this case. We recognize that this holding leads us to conflict with the results reached by the two other circuits to consider the Attorney General's revised construction of § 1231(a)(6). See Tran v. Mukasey, 515 F.3d 478 (5th Cir.2008); Thai v. Ashcroft, 366 F.3d 790 (9th Cir.2004). In those cases, the Fifth Circuit and Ninth Circuit reached a conclusion similar to that reached by the district court in this case: that the Attorney General's interpretation of § 1231(a)(6), as construed through 8 C.F.R. § 241.14, is unreasonable. See Tran, 515 F.3d at 485; Thai, 366 F.3d at 798-99. Both courts based their conclusions on the premise that the Supreme Court's decision in Zadvydas represented a final, definitive interpretation of 8 U.S.C. § 1231(a)(6). See Tran, 515 F.3d at 484 (While it is true that Zadvydas found that § 1231(a)(6) was ambiguous..., the Government ignores the fact that the Zadvydas court resolved this ambiguity by imposing a requirement that the detention last no longer than reasonably necessary to effectuate removal.); Thai, 366 F.3d at 798 ( [B]ecause Zadvydas construed § 1231(a)(6) to forbid the post-removal-period detention of an alien once removal is no longer reasonably foreseeable ..., we hold that Thai's continued detention is not authorized under § 1231(a)(6).) (emphasis added). We believe that the Fifth and Ninth Circuits erred by concluding that the Supreme Court could authoritatively and finally interpret § 1231(a)(6). Brand X makes clear that even after a court construes an agency's statute, the agency may, consistent with the court's holding, choose a different construction, since the agency remains the authoritative interpreter (within the limits of reason) of such statutes. Brand X, 545 U.S. at 983, 125 S.Ct. 2688. We therefore think Tran and Thai mistakenly focused on whether the Supreme Court's construction of 8 U.S.C. § 1231(a)(6) in Zadvydas authorized the kind of detention at issue here. Rather, the proper inquiry is whether the Attorney General's revised construction of § 1231(a)(6) is reasonable. We are reassured in disagreeing with the Fifth and Ninth Circuit by the fact that neither court considered the Supreme Court's Brand X decision. [1] In contrast, Judge Kozinski, dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc in Thai, anticipated Brand X to reach a conclusion similar to that which we reach today. The Supreme Court [in Zadvydas ], confronted with a very broad statute, narrowed its scope to avoid unconstitutionality, but the Court's method of narrowing is not the only permissible one. The AG, pursuant to his statutory delegation of regulatory authority, has selected a different method of conforming the statute to the requirements of the Constitution.... See Thai v. Ashcroft, 389 F.3d 967, 971 (9th Cir.2004) (Kozinski, J., dissenting from denial of en banc ). We conclude that Tran and Thai misconstrued the nature of the Supreme Court's decisions in Zadvydas and Martinez. In Zadvydas, the Supreme Court did not purport to resolve the statutory ambiguity in § 1231(a)(6) once and for all. Rather, the Court merely (properly, as we shall explain) declined to defer to an agency interpretation that raised serious constitutional doubts, and was therefore an unreasonable construction of Congress' intent. Because it owed the agency no deference, it was free to conclude that detention was authorized only for a six-month period. In no way, however, did the Court signal that its interpretation was the only reasonable construction of § 1231(a)(6). To the contrary, the Court specifically found the statute to be ambiguous. See Zadvydas, 533 U.S. at 697, 121 S.Ct. 2491. Moreover, the Court explicitly recognized that its construction of the statute was not the only reasonable one possible. See id, 533 U.S. at 701, 121 S.Ct. 2491 (While an argument can be made for confining any presumption to 90 days ... we recognize [a six month] period.) Thus, notwithstanding the contrary results reached by the Fifth and Ninth Circuits, we conclude that the agency's construction of § 1231(a)(6) is owed Chevron deference to the extent that it is reasonable. To be sure, this reasonableness inquiry requires us to address whether, and in what manner, an agency's interpretive discretion is constrained by the canon of constitutional avoidancequestions we consider next.