Disagreement About Chevron: Is Administrative Law the "Law of Public Administration"?

Abstract

Some judges and commentators perceive overthrowing Chevron as a battle for American constitutional democracy, while for another group, it just isn’t. This essay, a contribution of the Duke Law Journal’s administrative law symposium, argues that neither group recognizes this: Whether administration law is to be the law of public administration is the root cause of disagreements about the future of Chevron deference. We explain what it means to conceptualize administrative law this way, how Chevron embodies this conception, and how the failure to understand this creates the previous disagreement. We conclude that conceiving of administrative law as the law of public administration offers a constructive way forward to think about judicial review of statutory interpretation.