Chevron Patterns in the Circuit Courts

Abstract

Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC required courts to defer to federal agencies reasonable interpretation of ambiguous statutes that are administered through the agency. However, recently this “Chevron deference” has been called into question by the judiciary, the legal academy, and Congress. In this essay we briefly describe and highlight three of the most noteworthy findings from our empirical study of over 1,300 decisions of agency statutory interpretation (based on articles published in Chevron in the Circuit Courts, 116 Mich. L. Rev. 1 (2017) (Barnett and Walker); Chevron Step Two’s Domain, 93 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1441 (2018) (Barnett and Walker); The Politics of Selecting Chevron Deference, 15 J. Empirical L. Stud. 597 (2018) (Barnett, Boyd, and Walker); and Administrative Law’s Political Dynamics, 71 Vand. L. Rev. __ (2018) (Barnett, Boyd, and Walker).

Keywords: administrative law, Chevron, deference, statutory interpretation, ideological preferences, decisionmaking, standard of review

JEL Classification: K23, K49