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Full-Text Articles in Law
Mark Tushnet: The Right Questions, Philip C. Bobbitt
Mark Tushnet: The Right Questions, Philip C. Bobbitt
Faculty Scholarship
It is the most grotesque of ironies that much of twentieth-century jurisprudence has been an effort to make law into a science. This effort amounts to a reversal of a far earlier appropriation. It was the observation of regularities in gravity and the movement of the planets that reformed science and gave credence to the locution, 'the laws of nature.' Nature was "lawful" because it appeared to follow undeviatingly a certain regimen, which is to say that any deviations observed were held to be clues as to the true content of the laws that were being followed. Mathematics was the …
Chevron's Domain, Thomas W. Merrill, Kristin E. Hickman
Chevron's Domain, Thomas W. Merrill, Kristin E. Hickman
Faculty Scholarship
The Supreme Court's decision in Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Counsel, Inc. dramatically expanded the circumstances in which courts must defer to agency interpretations of statutes. The idea that deference on questions of law is sometimes required was not new. Prior to Chevron, however, courts were said to have such a duty only when Congress expressly delegates authority to an agency "to define a statutory term or prescribe a method of executing a statutory provision." Outside this narrow context, whether courts would defer to an agency's legal interpretation depended upon multiple factors that courts evaluated in …