How a Game-Changing Supreme Court Decision Affects MSHA

Quick Hits

• In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court overruled the Chevron doctrine, which had previously allowed courts to defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes.
• The Court’s ruling emphasizes that federal courts must independently interpret statutes, reinforcing checks on executive power.
• This shift will impact agencies like MSHA, requiring courts to focus on statutory intent rather than deferring to agency regulations in cases involving complex legal interpretations.

In the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision, the Supreme Court overruled a forty-year-old precedent in the Chevron decision and reinforced the responsibility of federal courts to exercise their independent judgment in reviewing agency interpretations of their governing statutes.

Rather than simply deferring to and accepting as valid any “reasonable” interpretation that an agency may put forth, the Supreme Court is now directing federal courts to have the final say on what federal statutes mean. Taken to its full measure, this decision should strengthen the checks and balances on the executive branch that the judicial branch is meant to provide.

Further Details

When Congress enacts a law delegating certain powers to an agency, situations inevitably arise where the law is not easily understood or applied.

This is especially true where the legislation itself or its subject matter is especially complex, or where the U.S. Congress may have left gaps in the law for an agency to fill with regulations or policy interpretations. This can provide needed opportunities for agency expertise to add to the legal framework or flexibility for the law to adapt to changing circumstances.

Still, this can also lead to agency overreach and misinterpretation of the law, which can inflate agency powers and cause other consequences inconsistent with Congress’s intent.

In 1984, the Supreme Court issued its Chevron ruling, which laid the modern groundwork, until now, for judicial review of agency interpretations of statutes. Under what came to be known as the “two-step Chevron doctrine,” a court would first determine whether the statutory language at issue was unambiguous. If it was, then the court was to apply that plain and unambiguous meaning to the issue at hand in the case without regard to what the agency’s interpretation may be, and that was the end of the matter.

On the other hand, if the court found that the meaning of the statute was not clear or the statute was silent, then the court was to move to step two and defer to the agency’s reading of the statutory language if the agency’s reading was “reasonable.” The agency’s interpretation did not have to be the most reasonable reading, nor did it have to be the reading that the court thought was best. It just had to be a permissible reading.

As one may imagine, in any case where a statute was ambiguous, the strong tendency was for courts to defer to agency interpretations. This was particularly true where the agency could claim to have special expertise on the matter. This made it quite difficult for a party challenging an agency’s legal interpretation to win its case where the court was likely to find the statute to be less than crystal clear on its face, even where a private party had expertise equal to or greater than the agency’s.

The Chevron doctrine came to be widely criticized as leading courts to essentially hand the reins over to the executive branch to say what the law means, which is not at all what was intended under the federal Administrative Procedure Act and the separation of powers scheme of the U.S. Constitution. For some time, there had been signs that the Supreme Court may have been preparing to overrule Chevron. We have now crossed that threshold with Loper Bright.

Key Takeaways

So, what does this all mean for MSHA’s interpretations of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act?

As with most judicial seismic shifts in the law, that remains to be seen as the lower courts wrestle with how to review agency interpretations in the absence of Chevron. What is known is that the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission and federal courts should be more focused now on issuing opinions based on what they find is the reading of the law most consistent with Congress’s intent without deferring to what the agency is advocating.

In the MSHA context, operators can expect this to come up in a variety of cases, including those concerning the scope of MSHA’s jurisdiction, the meaning of “interfere” in Section 105(c) discrimination cases, the meaning of “significant and substantial”—and more.

Ogletree Deakins’ Workplace Safety and Health Practice Group will continue to monitor developments and provide updates on the Mine Safety blog as additional information becomes available.

A version of this article was previously published in Pit & Quarry magazine.

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