Chevron Deference

Chevron deference, named for the 1984 Supreme Court case Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., was a doctrine of US administrative law requiring federal courts to defer to a government agency's reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute the agency administers, under a two-step test: first asking whether Congress has directly addressed the precise question at issue, and if the statute is silent or ambiguous, asking only whether the agency's interpretation is a permissible construction of it. The doctrine shaped decades of US regulatory litigation before the Supreme Court overruled it in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), holding that courts must exercise independent judgment in deciding whether an agency acted within its statutory authority rather than deferring to the agency's own reading. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/