Cary Coglianese on the future of administrative law

Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science Cary Coglianese has published one of the first print law journal articles analyzing the U.S. Supreme Court’s watershed decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which last year overturned the four-decade-old Chevron doctrine and sparked intense debates over the future of administrative law.

The article “The Great Unsettling: Administrative Governance After Loper Bright,” coauthored with Professor Daniel E. Walters of Texas A&M University School of Law, is published in the Administrative Law Review.

Coglianese and Walters note that three key words—“Chevron is overruled”—“surely captured more attention than any others in the Supreme Court’s thirty-five-page opinion.”

A chorus of scholars have offered confident predictions about how Loper Bright will shape the future of administrative governance—some argue it portends dire consequences, while others say it will make no difference. Yet Coglianese and Walters offer a note of scholarly caution. They explain why the ruling’s long-term effects remain uncertain—an uncertainty driven by the complex web of institutional politics that surrounds the work of administrative agencies.

“The complex organizational politics of administrative agencies—affected by both internal and external factors—makes predicting their organizational behavior generally beyond reach,” Coglianese and Walters write in their article.

They suggest that Loper Bright might best be considered “something of a Rorschach test inside a crystal ball”: people can see different things in it, especially when envisioning what comes next. “What they see,” Coglianese and Walters write, “may reflect more of what they are primed to see by their own cultural or ideological predispositions than by an underlying, confirmable reality.”

Read more at Penn Carey Law.