Eli Nachmany co-authored an essay in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy with Jennifer Mascott, reviewing the Supreme Court’s approach to statutory interpretation issues in October Term 2023. From the abstract:
This Essay takes stock of a pivotal moment at the Court: statutory interpretation at center stage in administrative law. The U.S. Supreme Court’s most recent Term saw numerous landscape-shifting administrative law decisions. The most widely discussed was the Court’s elimination of 40-year-old Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The Court’s decisions also effected significant change in the scope of Seventh Amendment jury trial rights and the length of time that individuals, businesses, and associations have to challenge agency actions.
But taken together, the Court’s decisions did not radically restructure the administrative state on constitutional grounds. Despite the substantial mindset shift in conceptions of how courts should review agency legal determinations and conduct enforcement actions, the Court rejected or failed to reach several constitutional law challenges. Instead, the Court’s leading cases tended to resolve on carefully measured statutory grounds, at times with Justice alignments that transcended typical ideological or jurisprudential lines. Also, last Term’s most significant administrative law decisions may give important predictive clues about how the Court will apply statutory constraints to free-ranging administrative claims to vast regulatory power in future years.
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