Chevron Then and Now
I was a junior lawyer in the Solicitor General’s office when the now-famous Chevron decision came down. It was a significant victory, but to my memory no one noticed that the case had announced a new “doctrine” of deference to agency legal interpretations. The opinion did not seem to establish Chevron Steps One or Two, let alone Step Zero. To the lawyers in “The Office,” Chevron was a rare but welcome vindication of reasonable agency action in the face of a decades-old pattern of meddlesome interference by the D.C. Circuit. The decision was not seen to stand for the proposition that agencies have interpretive authority superior to the courts. It stood for the more modest proposition that courts cannot overturn the policy decisions of agencies without a solid basis in the relevant statutes – a point that should have been obvious all along. If the statute could reasonably be interpreted to support the agency action, the court should do so.
