Chevron for Juries

Abstract

Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. rests on two now-familiar premises. First, for some statutes, the traditional tools of statutory interpretation more readily yield a range of plausible meanings than a single correct reading. Second, judges are not always the officials best positioned to select one interpretation of a statute from among the plausible options. Chevron relied on these premises to decide that when a court finds ambiguity in a statute administered by an agency, it must defer to the agency’s interpretation of the statute, so long as it is reasonable. But while administrative law provided a doctrinal context for the Court’s decision, Chevron’s interpretive premises were about statutes generally, not statutes administered by agencies.

Commentators seldom recognize the general nature of Chevron’s interpretive premises. This article shines a spotlight on it by applying the premises to a class of statutes outside administrative law. Judges, I argue, are not the best-situated actors in our legal system to pick from among the legally plausible readings of conduct-regulating statutes of general applicability. Indeed, they are not even the best-situated actors in the courtroom. Juries possess epistemic and political qualities that make them expert interpreters of conduct-regulating statutes that are generally applicable. I invoke that expertise to propose “Chevron for Juries,” a series of procedural reforms that would transfer interpretive primacy for this class of statutes to juries.

Keywords: statutory interpretation, juries, Chevron, administrative law, institutional design

JEL Classification: K23, K41