Supreme Court facing challenging session

The U.S. Supreme Court’s new session will be one of the most significant and challenging in its history. In a single term, the Court will weigh issues that will determine the nature of the presidential election, the immunity of a president’s conduct, the authority of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve drugs (of course, here, in the context of an abortifacient), gun rights, the interplay of state and federal laws regarding emergency medical treatments (especially abortions), and more. Just a few weeks ago, the most prominent cases involved the nature of the administrative state and the Chevron doctrine! As this newsletter confines itself to matters generally affecting the workplace, we will focus on those still critical cases and others involving labor law.

Chevron doctrine under duress

Two cases, Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, will give the Court the opportunity to define just what degree of deference an executive agency deserves when issuing a regulation. For much of the last 35 years, this hasn’t been a controversial issue. However, in the recent past, as the pace and breadth of regulation has increased, conservative jurists and commenters have more closely scrutinized whether an agency issuing a regulation has the specific statutory authority to do so.