The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo will fundamentally change the courts’ approach to interpreting regulatory statutes and reviewing the actions of administrative agencies. 

The Court renounced Chevron deference: under the APA, “courts must exercise independent judgment in determining the meaning of statutory provisions.” 

“In exercising such judgment,” the Court added, “courts may—as they have from the start—seek aid from the interpretations of those responsible for implementing particular statutes.” But in the end, the courts’ responsibility for interpreting regulatory statutes, like any other statutes, is to employ “the traditional tools of statutory interpretation, not individual policy preferences.”

What will this mean in practice? After decades of Chevron deference, what questions or challenges might arise when judges interpret regulatory statutes—or when they interpret other parts of the APA itself?

Judges, lawyers, legislators and academics will grapple with these questions for many years to come—just as they did for decades after Chevron itself. Legal scholarship, at its best, exists to inform and improve such deliberations, the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State is inviting papers on “Textualism and Administration After Loper Bright,” to be presented and discussed at a research roundtable at the Antonin Scalia Law School in Summer 2025.

As with all of our roundtables, the Gray Center welcomes papers at all stages of development, from very-preliminary overviews to near-final drafts. If we receive more papers than we can include at this roundtable, then we will select papers with an eye to a diversity of perspectives and stages of development. 

To support scholarly research and discussion on this important subject, we offer authors a substantial honorarium for their draft, and after the roundtable we will post the authors’ subsequent drafts to the Gray Center’s Working Papers Series.

If you would like to submit a paper for this roundtable, then please email a short description of your project to the Gray Center’s executive director, Adam White (awhite36@gmu.edu), by February 10, 2025. We will schedule the roundtable in consultation with the authors.