Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council: Its influence on Supreme Court decision -making and administrative agency behavior.

摘要

This dissertation explores the impact of the 1984 Supreme Court decision, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. I focus on the effect of the two part Chevron test for cases involving contested agency interpretations of statutes, on Supreme Court deference to administrative agencies. The two part Chevron test directs that if there is a challenge to an agency interpretation of a congressional statute, first, the Court asks whether Congress' intent is clearly stated. If the answer is no, then the Court moves on to step two, which calls for the Court to accept any reasonable interpretation of the statute.;Court scholars expected Chevron to result in an increase in Supreme Court deference to administrative agencies. Instead of the expected increase, there was a decrease in deference to administrative agency interpretations of statutes. This dissertation employs ordinary least squares analysis in determining why deference decreased. The first half of the dissertation focuses on whether the decrease in deference occurred due to Supreme Court justices voting their personal ideologies, rather than basing decisions on precedent. The second half of the dissertation focuses on whether there has been a shift in the type of agency expression present cases reaching the Supreme Court.;I arrive at several exciting and important conclusions. First, although the votes of Supreme Court justices are strongly aligned with their personal policy preferences, the attitude of Supreme Court justices does not explain why deference to administrative agencies decreased after Chevron. Second, there has been a shift in the type of agency expression involved in cases heard by the Supreme Court. Specifically, the Court is hearing more cases involving what I call informal agency expression, and they are deferring to the cases at a higher rate. The decrease in may be due to the fact that the Court is hearing a larger proportion of the cases which historically received a lower level of deference, than the entire class of statutory interpretation cases. Aggregate deference decreased, while deference within some single categories of expression increased. It is still premature to conclude that Chevron was the cause of the shift.