The Supreme Court Didn’t Destroy the Regulatory State. It Stood Up for Due Process.
With a set of rulings handed down over the past week, the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court decisively stood up for the due process rights of Americans who come into conflict with the administrative state.
On their own, each of those rulings is significant. In a pair of cases decided together last week, the Supreme Court overturned a decades-old precedent that required judges to defer to the supposed expertise of executive agencies. In scrapping the so-called Chevron doctrine, the Court leveled the playing field for legal challenges to regulatory rules.
In a separate case decided on Thursday, S.E.C. v. Jarkesy, the Court said that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must try civil fraud suits in federal district court rather than using its own, internal administrative law courts. The decision protects the right to a trial by jury and will ensure that fewer Americans will be forced to navigate the expensive, time-consuming administrative law system before getting their case heard by a real court.
Finally, on Monday, the Court ruled that businesses can challenge federal regulations within six years of suffering some harm at the hands of the administrative state. Previously, those challenges were limited to six years after the regulation itself was approved—an arrangement that effectively eliminated any hope of due process for those victimized by longstanding rules.
Linked together, the outcome of these four cases and three decisions is even greater than the sum of their parts. In identical 6–3 decisions, the Court’s conservative majority sent a clear signal that federal judges ought to have the final say on matters involving the regulatory state—because that’s the system our Constitution requires.
That’s not a power grab by the federal judiciary—as some commentators have claimed—but a restoration of the proper role of judges as a check on executive agencies’ power.
“Most people understand that, when it comes to criminal defendants, people deserve their day in court in front of a neutral arbiter. It should be equally common-sensical that when the accused is a family-run fishing business contesting an agency’s power, or a man accused of breaking
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