Ohio Supreme Court Rejects Deference to Agency Statutory Interpretations
Today the Ohio Supreme Court held, in TWISM Ents., L.L.C. v. State Bd. of Registration for Professional Engineers & Surveyors , that Ohio courts need not defer to state agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. In other words, the Court held that there is no Chevron deference in Ohio.
Justice Patrick DeWine wrote the opinion for the Court, joined by three of his colleagues: Justices Fischer, Donnelly, and soon(-to-be-Chief) Kennedy. Chief Justice O’Connor and Justices Brunner and Stewart concurred in the judgement only, but none wrote separately to defend deference to agency interpretations. The 4-3 spliyt is also interesting because the justices did not divide along partisan lines.
Justice DeWine begins his opinion this way:
This case involves a dispute about a statute that sets forth the requirements a firm must meet to provide engineering services in Ohio. Specifically, the firm must “designate one or more full-time partners, managers, members, officers, or directors” as in “responsible charge” of its engineering activities. R.C. 4733.16(D). The state agency in charge of administering the statute contends that to be a full-time manager, one must be an employee and cannot be an independent contractor. The court of appeals determined that it was required to defer to the agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute and, on this basis, held that the statute precluded an independent contractor from fulfilling the role of full-time manager.
To resolve the dispute, we must answer two questions. The predicate question is: What deference, if any, should a court give to an administrative agency’s interpretation of a statute? Second, once we have sorted ou
Article from Reason.com
