The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a lawsuit challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s approach to regulating the abortion pill mifepristone with a ruling that will continue to allow the pills to be mailed to patients without an in-person doctor’s visit.
Not a law-talker type here, but essentially, when the legislature creates an agency like the FDA, it delegates powers to them to make rulings on certain matters but does not specifically legislate every decision that agency has to make. It says that the FDA can make rulings about drug safety, but it doesn’t say explicitly what drugs the FDA can make decisions about.
In this particular case, the FDA has said that a drug, mifepristone, is safe and doctors can prescribe it to patients. The law suit claimed that the FDA overstepped it’s authority because the legislature never explicitly gave the FDA the power to do that. This is a flawed argument because SCOTUS already decided, in the linked case above, that it was inappropriate for the court to substitute its own interpretation of a rule on an issue like this where the legislature gave an agency an implicit power to make such a decision as long as the agency’s decision is reasonable.
That is the Chevron Deference. It means that the courts should defer to agency rulings when those rulings are reasonable even if the power to make the ruling is only implicitly granted to the agency.
I may not be dead on the mark here, but I think I’m fairly close. If not, I’m sure some real law-talker type will be along to correct me.
Not a lawyer either, to be clear. I think your general description holds, but the example wouldn’t. Individual drugs would still fall under the explicit granted ability to regulate “drugs” as a whole. I think the injunction power referenced in today’s NLRB ruling might be a good example actually, even if they didn’t explicitly reject it via this mechanism today.
Chevron deference <------- Non-ELI5
Not a law-talker type here, but essentially, when the legislature creates an agency like the FDA, it delegates powers to them to make rulings on certain matters but does not specifically legislate every decision that agency has to make. It says that the FDA can make rulings about drug safety, but it doesn’t say explicitly what drugs the FDA can make decisions about.
In this particular case, the FDA has said that a drug, mifepristone, is safe and doctors can prescribe it to patients. The law suit claimed that the FDA overstepped it’s authority because the legislature never explicitly gave the FDA the power to do that. This is a flawed argument because SCOTUS already decided, in the linked case above, that it was inappropriate for the court to substitute its own interpretation of a rule on an issue like this where the legislature gave an agency an implicit power to make such a decision as long as the agency’s decision is reasonable.
That is the Chevron Deference. It means that the courts should defer to agency rulings when those rulings are reasonable even if the power to make the ruling is only implicitly granted to the agency.
I may not be dead on the mark here, but I think I’m fairly close. If not, I’m sure some real law-talker type will be along to correct me.
Not a lawyer either, to be clear. I think your general description holds, but the example wouldn’t. Individual drugs would still fall under the explicit granted ability to regulate “drugs” as a whole. I think the injunction power referenced in today’s NLRB ruling might be a good example actually, even if they didn’t explicitly reject it via this mechanism today.