The US Supreme Court heard oral argument Wednesday in Kisor v. Wilkie, a case dealing with federal agency deference.
The question presented is "[w]hether the Supreme Court should overrule Auer v. Robbins and Bowles v. Seminole Rock & Sand Co., which direct courts to defer to an agency's reasonable interpretation of its own ambiguous regulation." When an agency's regulation is ambiguous, courts will "generally accept the agency's interpretation of that law as long as the interpretation is reasonable (and even if the court might interpret the law differently)." This is partly because agencies are generally thought to have more "expertise in the subject covered by the law than courts do."
