Following the Supreme Court: A New Approach to Judicial Review of Government Agency Decisions?

Please join us for the next edition of Third Thursday - Crowell & Moring’s Employment Law Update, a webinar series dedicated to helping businesses stay on top of developing law and emerging compliance issues.

Several opinions from this year’s Supreme Court docket involve judicial review of administrative agency decisions. This is an important issue for compliance-focused employers; increased enforcement activity by regulatory agencies has become the “new normal.” And while predicting future Court trends is a risky proposition, the Court may be more sympathetic to cases in which the business community can demonstrate that an administrative agency has exceeded its proper role. The addition of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Court will accelerate interest about the scope of the Court’s deference to decisions made by certain administrative agencies under what is known as Chevron and Auer deference.

In this month’s program, our panelists will review these issues in the context of several cases from the Court’s recent term, including:

• McLane v. EEOC (standard of judicial review of subpoenas issued by government agencies such as EEOC);
• NLRB v. SW General Inc. (reviewing the power of ‘acting officers’ appointed to regulatory agencies);
• Matal v. Tam (deference to decision made by the Trademark Office affecting free speech rights); and
• The ERISA “Church Plan” cases (authority of DOL, IRS and PGBC to exempt benefit plans from certain ERISA requirements)

Our program will also review selected cases already on the Court’s docket for next year that raise some of these issues.