I'm Elizabeth Slattery and welcome to SCOTUS 101, where we break down what's happening at the Supreme Court, what the justices are up to, and other things related to our favorite branch of government.

This week, I'm joined by Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law, Houston, and a prolific blogger.

Josh, welcome back to SCOTUS 101. Thank you so much for

having me. So this week we're going to talk about a big Supreme Court grant and a missed

opportunity. I also recently sat down with my heritage colleague Paul Larkin to reflect on his 27

Supreme Court arguments. So first up, the Supreme Court justices recently sat for their

official portrait, which they do whenever they have a new member of the court, and now they're out

until January 4th, but not without dropping a couple of bombs before leaving. On Monday,

the court granted cert in an incredibly important case involving deference to administrative

agencies.

The case is Kaiser v. Wilkie, and the issue is whether the court should overrule

Hour v. Robbins and Bowles v. Seminole Rock and Sand Company, which direct courts to defer to an

agency's reasonable interpretation of its own ambiguous regulation. So this isn't the first time the court has been

asked to overrule these cases, but with the addition of two justices who are very skeptical

of agency deference, this could be the beginning of the end for Hour and Seminole Rock, and perhaps

other agency deference doctrines are not far behind them. So, Josh, how do you think this case is going to

play out? Well, let's first explain what our and similar rock deference are. Most people are

familiar with the idea of Chevron deference. This is the idea that Congress enacts a statute with an

ambiguous term that courts will give deference to an agency's interpretation of that ambiguous

term so long as that interpretation is reasonable, and that's a fairly broad standard.

Our deference, or sometimes called seminal rock deference, is a little bit different.

Here, when an agency issues a regulation and then subsequently interprets its own regulation,

...