Here are some of the legal battles playing out in courts across the nation that have cited the Supreme Court’s landmark climate ruling. “My office will continue to fight for the rights of West Virginians when those in Washington try to go too far in asserting broad powers without the people’s support,” Morrisey, the lead challenger in the Supreme Court case, said in a statement after the opinion was released ( Greenwire, June 30). The conservative counterargument is that the major questions doctrine helps ensure a separation of powers between Congress and the executive branch - a buffer West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R) has vowed to protect. “Now they are going to need to find specific authorization,” he said. Under the Chevron doctrine - which has fallen out of favor in recent years with the conservative-dominated Supreme Court - judges largely defer to an agency’s expertise, leaving it to “come up with solutions tailored to the problem,” Duffy said.
Jay Duffy, an attorney for the Clean Air Task Force, said he expected the ruling to be used as an “anti-regulatory hurdle.”ĭuffy, who represented environmental and public health groups in West Virginia, said the decision is likely to have “a lot of repercussions for other agencies who are operating under these broadly worded statutes where Congress has expected them to use their expertise and technical know-how to deal with some of the most pressing problems facing the country.” “The Court has created a new hammer and now every lawyer thinks their case is a nail,” Percival said. But the Supreme Court’s June 30 ruling - which more fully defined, and some say transformed, the decades-old doctrine - has provided those groups more ammo in the legal battlefield ( Greenwire, April 11). The number of court filings citing the major questions doctrine since West Virginia was decided “illustrates the old adage that ‘when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,'” said Robert Percival, director of the University of Maryland’s environmental law program.ĭespite Chief Justice John Roberts writing in the majority opinion that the doctrine should be reserved for “extraordinary cases” only, “so many industry lawyers think it applies to their cases,” Percival said in an email.Įven before it was decided, West Virginia was fueling a push by conservative groups to raise major questions challenges against some of the Biden administration’s biggest climate actions. But the Supreme Court didn’t specify how or when a regulation may qualify as “major,” largely leaving such determinations to federal agencies and the lower courts.
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