It has been a year since the Supreme Court ended Chevron deference in Loper Bright; but a Rhode Island district court judge still ruled against the Relentless fisherman.

Rhode Island Judge Rules Against Fishermen in Companion Case to Loper Bright

A federal judge in the District of Rhode Island ruled in favor of the government yesterday in Relentless v. Department of Commerce, the companion case to Loper Bright v. Raimondo, which was sent back to lower courts on remand after the Supreme Court’s historic decision last year.  With the end of Chevron, the district court was tasked with re-evaluating the government’s arguments for whether the National Marine Fisheries Service (“NMFS”) had authority to require certain commercial fishermen to pay the salaries of the government-approved monitors who ride their boats to watch them fish. The judge in Relentless identified two bases for the legality of the industry-funding mandate. 

It is quite striking how the district court in Relentless omitted any in-depth analysis of its construction of the Magnuson-Stevens Act (“MSA”).  It did not grapple with the actual text of the Act and, more disturbingly, did not explain how it was applying (or not!) the traditional canons of statutory construction. Even more alarming is the district court’s analysis of the MSA’s “necessary and appropriate” provision.  Although the court acknowledged its duty under Loper Bright to “recogniz[e] constitutional delegations, [and] fix the boundaries of the [agency’s] delegated authority,” it did not do so here. 

And that is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the Relentless decision.  It leaves the door open to much regulatory mischief that can be justified in the ambiguous name of whatever is deemed by NMFS as “necessary and appropriate” for the conservation and management of domestic fisheries.

Celebrating the One Year Anniversary of a Landmark Supreme Court Victory 

June 28, 2025, marked the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a transformative decision that ended four decades of Chevron deference.  By restoring to courts the duty to interpret the law and provide an independent judgment as to its best meaning, the Supreme Court helped realign the proper balance of power between Congress, the administrative state, and the federal judiciary.

“The Loper Bright decision changed the landscape of administrative law.  It will be remembered as a watershed moment in Supreme Court jurisprudence,” said Ryan P. Mulvey, senior policy counsel at Americans for Prosperity Foundation and senior counsel at Cause of Action Institute.  “The Court was right to reiterate the Founders’ vision of judges—not bureaucrats—telling us what the law means.  The end of Chevron deference is an important step to helping us keep regulatory agencies in check and within the bounds of the authority given to them by Congress.”

Over the past year, Loper Bright has influenced developments across the federal government.  Courts at the federal and state levels have cited the precedent in over 1,000 cases.  In some of the more impactful decisions, the new Loper Bright standard was used to invalidated the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules, and to reject the Food and Drug Administration’s novel attempt to regulate laboratory testing services as manufactured “devices.”  

Loper Surfaces in FCC v. Consumers’ Research—A Nondelegation Challenge to the Universal Service Fund

This past Term, the Supreme Court cited Loper Bright in several statutory interpretation decisions, including Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Bondi v. VanDerStock, McLaughlin Chiropractic Assocs., Inc. v. McKesson Corp., and City and County of San Francisco v. EPA. Loper Bright surfaced again on the last day of the Term in FCC v. Consumers’ Research, a case involving a nondelegation and private nondelegation challenge to the Universal Service Fund—a telecommunications social welfare program funded by a charge set by unelected administrators at the FCC (who, in turn, punted that task to a private corporation made up of self-interested industry insiders).

Consumers’ Research presented the Court with an opportunity to reinvigorate the nondelegation doctrine by enforcing Article I’s bar against Congress transferring its exclusive legislative power to other entities. The Court did not take that path. Instead, in a 6­–3 decision, the Court declined to revisit the “intelligible principle” regime, rejecting Consumers’ Research’s nondelegation and private nondelegation challenges, as well as the Fifth Circuit’s “combination theory” of unconstitutionality.

Quick Hits

• Two commenters from the NYU School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity published a piece on the Yale Notice & Comment blog challenging the Trump Administration’s invocation of Loper Bright as a nondiscretionary basis to rescind the existing regulatory definition of “harm” in the Endangered Species Act.

• Harvard Law School’s Matthew Stephenson recently published “The Gray Area: Finding Implicit Delegation to Agencies After Loper Bright.” 

• Bloomberg Law’s Robert Iafolla writes about how “circuit courts have started going in different directions on the level of deference judges should grant agencies.”

• At SCOTUSblog, Professor Abbe Gluck writes about Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, and “the broader question of how the court will grapple with questions of expertise in the wake of its 2024 decision overruling Chevron[.]”