Chevron U.S.A. v. NRDC (1984): "if the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency's answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute." Deference unless: What are the exceptions to Court deference
- Unconstitutional
- Exceeds statutory authority or violates statutory procedure
- Arbitrary, capricious, abuse of discretion, or unsupported by substantial evidence
- You're a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court that must decide whether to give the administrative agency Chevron deference to interpret the statute or not? Explain your reasoning
- SCIALABBA v. CUELLAR DE OSORIO (2013)
Facts of the Case: The Immigration and Nationality Act permits qualifying U. S. citizens and lawful permanent residents (LPRs) to petition for certain family members to obtain immigrant visas. A sponsored individual, known as the principal beneficiary, is placed into a "family preference" category based on his relationship with the petitioner. 8 U. S. C. §§1153(a)(1)-(4). The principal beneficiary's spouse and minor children in turn qualify as derivative beneficiaries, "entitled to the same status" and "order of consideration" as the principal. §1153(d). The beneficiaries then become eligible to apply for visas in order of "priority date"-that is, the date a petition was filed. §1153(e)(1). Because the immigration process often takes years or decades to complete, a child seeking to immigrate may "age out"-i.e., reach adulthood and lose her immigration status-before she reaches the front of the visa queue. The Child Status Protection Act (CSPA) sets forth a remedy in that circumstance, providing that "[i]f the age of an alien is determined . . . to be 21 years of age or older," notwithstanding certain allowances for bureaucratic delay, §§1153(h)(1)-(2), "the alien's petition shall automatically be converted to the appropriate category and the alien shall retain the original priority date issued upon receipt of the original petition." §1153(h)(3).
Respondents, principal beneficiaries who became LPRs, filed petitions for their aged-out children, asserting that the newly filed petitions should receive the same priority date as their original petitions. Instead, U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) gave the new petitions current priority dates. The District Court granted the Government summary judgment, deferring to the Board of Immigration Appeals' (BIA's) determination that only those petitions that can be seamlessly converted from one family preference category to another without the need for a new sponsor are entitled to conversion under §1153(h)(3). The en banc Ninth Circuit reversed, holding that the provision unambiguously entitled all aged-out derivative beneficiaries to automatic conversion and priority date retention.
Legal question: Did the Board of Immigration Appeals reasonably interpret the INA when denying the respondents' request?
CITY OF ARLINGTON, TX v. FCC (2012) Generally, wireless phone service providers must obtain zoning approvals from state and local governments before building wireless towers or attaching wireless equipment to buildings. To speed up the process, Congress amended the 1934 Communications Act and required local governments to respond to zoning requests within a reasonable period of time. Despite this law, the zoning approval process still dragged on and severely delayed construction. In 2008, the Wireless Association petitioned the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC") to bring an end to these unreasonable delays. The Association recommended placing time limits on how long these zoning requests could take. The FCC agreed and in November 2009 set the following "reasonable time" limits for zoning requests: 90 days for attachments to current buildings and a150 days for new structures.
The local governments claimed that the FCC cannot set these limits because the FCC cannot determine its own power under the Communications Act. When Congress passed the Act, it granted a certain amount of power to the FCC to enforce and define the rules under the Act. Under the long-standing Chevron doctrine of interpretation, courts should always defer to an agency's interpretation of a particular act. However, the Supreme Court had never determined whether this applies to situations where the agency defines its own power under a particular law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit nevertheless deferred to the FCC and affirmed the declaratory ruling. The local governments appealed to the Supreme Court, which granted certiorari exclusively to answer whether the Chevron doctrine applies in this situation.
Legal Question: Should a court apply the Chevron doctrine and defer to an agency's interpretation of its jurisdiction under a particular law when that interpretation is called into question?
FDA v. Brown & Williamson (2000)
Facts of the Case: The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA), 21 U.S.C. § 301 (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
et seq., grants the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as the designee of the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), the authority to regulate, among other items, "drugs" and "devices," §§321(g)-(h), 393. In 1996, the FDA asserted jurisdiction to regulate tobacco products, concluding that, under the FDCA, nicotine is a "drug" and cigarettes and smokeless tobacco are "devices" that deliver nicotine to the body. Pursuant to this authority, the FDA promulgated regulations governing tobacco products' promotion, labeling, and accessibility to children and adolescents. The FDA found that tobacco use is the Nation's leading cause of premature death, resulting in more than 400,000 deaths annually, and that most adult smokers begin when they are minors. The regulations therefore aim to reduce tobacco use by minors so as to substantially reduce the prevalence of addiction in future generations, and thus the incidence of tobacco-related death and disease. Respondents, a group of tobacco manufacturers, retailers, and advertisers, filed this suit challenging the FDA's regulations. They moved for summary judgment on the ground, inter alia, that the FDA lacked jurisdiction to regulate tobacco products as customarily marketed, that is, without manufacturer claims of therapeutic benefit. The District Court upheld the FDA's authority, but the Fourth Circuit reversed, holding that Congress has not granted the FDA jurisdiction to regulate tobacco products. The court concluded that construing the FDCA to include tobacco products would lead to several internal inconsistencies in the Act. It also found that evidence external to the FDCA-that the FDA consistently stated before 1995 that it lacked jurisdiction over tobacco, that Congress has enacted several tobacco-specific statutes fully cognizant of the FDA's position, and that Congress has considered and rejected many bills that would have given the agency such authority-confirms this conclusion.
Legal Question: Does the Food and Drug Administration have the authority to regulate tobacco products as "drugs" and "devices" under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act?