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Comment by Gormo | Hacker News Reader

> Now businesses must factor in the uncertainty of any random person launching a lawsuit that causes a local court to reverse a federal agency policy. Huge potential impacts to product / revenue, not just legal fees to fight everything

Businesses already have to deal with frequent litigation, including class-action lawsuits even in areas that overlap with regulatory agencies.

Quite to the contrary of what you are suggesting, reversing Chevron doctrine will allow the courts to develop a body of solid precedent surrounding these areas of law, and create a more stable legal framework, rather than the status quo of opaque, politicized agencies having the power to re-interpret their authority and change the regulatory environment at their own prerogative -- stare decisis doesn't apply to executive agencies, but it certainly does apply to the courts.

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Except this and other rulings mean there's no such thing as "solid precedent" anymore.

No, again, you've got it exactly backwards. "Solid precedent" can now be established via the development of jurisprudence under stare decisis, as is the judiciary's role.

Under Chevron, agencies themselves were interpreting and re-interpreting statute law as they saw fit, and there was no binding precedent at all.

The moment a court is asked to make a decision on one of these matters there will then be case-building precedent.

What your comment suggests is that there will _never_ be 'solid precedent' which is an inaccurate interpretation.

You're literally staring at the courts dismantling several decades long precedent, though?

Yes, sometimes that's necessary when bad rulings slip through. If there was no mechanism to reverse bad precedent, we'd be in a pretty bad situation -- we wouldn't have this ruling, we wouldn't have Brown v. Board of Education, etc.

But the courts do this carefully and infrequently, and create a level of stability in the law that's far stronger than allowing the ever-changing landscape of statutory law and administrative rule-making to provide the final say over complex questions.

That's exactly the point of this ruling -- the courts had delegated the responsibility for shaping jurisprudence that defined the limits of administrative power to the administrative agencies themselves, allowing those agencies to interpret and re-interpret the boundaries of their own authority in pursuit of whatever ephemeral issue they were focused on at the moment.

This was an abdication of the courts' own duty, and it's a very good thing that they've decided to take responsibility for it once more.

oh yeah because our courts have definitely shown themselves to be non partisan, like how one of the republican supreme court justices thinks they are at war ideologically against the other side and must win

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