Deference to Agency Expertise in Statutory Interpretation

Deference to Agency Expertise in Statutory Interpretation

March 31, 2024, 31 George Mason Law Review 588

Federal courts defer to federal agencies’ expertise when reviewing those agencies’ statutory interpretations. But “agency expertise” has become a catch-all term in the caselaw for several kinds of agency knowledge. A good amount of that knowledge is irrelevant to the job of statutory interpretation, which is the particular task of determining the meaning of the text of a law. This Article identifies three types of agency expertise and concludes that only one is germane to statutory interpretation. With respect to any statutory scheme, an agency might have (1) scientific expertise, (2) political or policymaking expertise, or (3) interpretive expertise. That third type of expertise—relating to an agency’s ability to decipher the meaning of a statute’s text—is the only type of expertise that courts should consider when affording respect to an agency’s interpretation of a given statute.