Reflections on “From Deference to Deliberation”

By Loza Taye | November 13th, 2025

A few months ago, my colleagues and I wrote a piece for The Environmental Forum titled "From Deference to Deliberation." In that article, we examined how the Supreme Court's 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which overturned the long-standing Chevron deference doctrine, could reshape the relationship between courts and federal agencies.

For forty years, Chevron guided how judges reviewed agency decisions. When Congress passed a law with ambiguous language, courts generally deferred to the agency’s reasonable interpretation of that law. This system recognized that agencies like the EPA bring deep scientific and technical expertise to the table. With Loper Bright, that framework has changed. Courts must now interpret unclear statutory language for themselves, treating these questions as matters of law. Agencies still retain discretion over factual and scientific judgments, but they no longer have the same flexibility to fill in legal gaps.

In our piece, we suggested that this shift would prompt agencies to adopt greater precision and transparency. The authority to regulate increasingly carries the responsibility to define terms clearly, document the scientific basis for decisions, and explain how uncertainty is handled. Many core environmental and public health terms, such as "unreasonable risk," "adequate margin of safety," and "best available technology," were written to provide agencies with room to apply their scientific judgment. Without Chevron, those same terms may now be defined by courts rather than by the experts who apply and interpret them every day. Two sidebar essays that accompanied our article offered valuable perspectives on what this new era might look like.

John Cruden's sidebar examines Chevron from a different angle. Where our piece focuses on the practical and scientific implications of Loper Bright for agencies, his writing stays rooted in the legal realignment itself. While his piece and ours both recognize that agencies will face greater scrutiny and will need to rely on clear, well-reasoned records, Cruden frames this as a new opportunity. He explains that while the court ultimately decides the interpretation of ambiguous terms, it will consider both agency creativity and expert analysis. Court decisions will not be guided by only agency interpretation but broader expert views.

Sanne Knudson offered a complementary view. She wrote that the "best reading" of environmental statutes should continue to favor protecting people and the environment, particularly when science is uncertain. She warned that without Chevron, courts could produce inconsistent, case-by-case interpretations that weaken environmental protections. To avoid that, she suggested a "rebuttable presumption" approach: when a law is ambiguous, courts should begin with the understanding that environmental statutes are meant to be protective unless the text clearly says otherwise. That, she argued, would promote consistency and better reflect the purposes Congress built into these laws.

Several months later, it's still too soon to know the exact effects of Loper Bright, but one thing is already clear: the balance between expertise and interpretation is shifting. The era of automatic deference may be over, but the work of deliberation has only just begun.

You can read the full article in the September/October issue of The Environmental Forum. We welcome thoughts, questions, and perspectives from all our readers!

The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Johns Hopkins University or Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.