The Supreme Court will hear Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo in the Court’s term beginning this October.¹ Loper concerns regulations promulgated by the National Marine Fisheries Service (“NMFS”) under the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act (“MSA”). Some of these regulations require fishing boats to carry federal agents on board to enforce the NMFS’s rules, and some even require the fishermen to pay the interloping agents’ salaries. 

The Court declined to address technical issues of the regulations in question and instead granted Loper certiorari to debate whether the NMFS’s regulations should be given “Chevron” deference.²  The Chevron doctrine directs courts to defer to the regulations issued by the agency charged with implementing the law as the “correct” interpretation of a statute which is otherwise ambiguous, even if the agency’s regulation is not the “best” interpretation.

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1. Docket No. 22-451.↩
2. See Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC, 467 U.S. 837 (1984)↩