Does the Supreme Court really not apply Chevron when it should?

Natalie Salmanowitz and Holger Spamann

International Review of Law and Economics, 2019, vol. 57, issue C, 81-89

Abstract: William Eskridge and Lauren Baer’s (96 Geo. L.J. 1083 (2008)) “empirical study of all 1014 Supreme Court cases between Chevron and Hamdan in which an agency interpretation of a statute was at issue” finds that “the Court does not apply the Chevron framework in nearly three-quarters of the cases where it would appear applicable.” Our reexamination of this study finds that the fraction of such cases is far lower, and indeed closer to zero. Our main methodological innovation is to infer Chevron applicability from Supreme Court litigants’ briefs rather than our own evaluation of the cases’ facts, as in Eskridge and Baer’s study. In over half the cases flagged by Eskridge and Baer, neither of the parties (nor, where applicable, the Solicitor General as amicus) cited Chevron, and in almost half of the cases within that subset, no one argued for or against deference of any kind. In most of a sample of the remaining cases, the Supreme Court either did not need to reach the Chevron issue, or actually applied it, at least in an abbreviated form.

Keywords: Chevron; Replication; Administrative Law; Empirical methodology; Measurement; Constitutional Law; Deference; Standard of review (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:irlaec:v:57:y:2019:i:c:p:81-89

DOI: 10.1016/j.irle.2018.12.003

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