UVA Law Professor Discusses Judicial Deference at Harvard Law School’s Annual Scalia Lecture

University of Virginia law professor Aditya Bamzai delivered a speech on legal scope and the domain of judicial deference at the Harvard Law School’s annual Scalia lecture on Wednesday.

Established in 2013 to further the understanding of the U.S. Constitution’s foundational principles, the Justice Antonin Scalia lecture series has previously featured speakers including University of Chicago law professor William P. Baude, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, and political scientist Peter Berkowitz.

Interim HLS Dean John C.P. Goldberg delivered the event’s opening remarks, lauding Scalia’s generosity to his alma mater.

“He regularly returned to campus to judge moot courts, to meet the students, to give lectures, and to teach classes,” Goldberg said.

“In these settings, too, he would engage in spirited, candid, and direct exchanges about ideas, doctrines, or decisions and always with a sense of humor,” he added.

Following Goldberg’s introductory address, Bamzai began his lecture with two interconnected anecdotes about how a Q&A session with former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens sparked his interest in the landmark Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defence Council case — a case which Bamzai later explored more closely during his time clerking for Scalia.

During this case, the Court deferred interpretation of the Clean Air Act to the Environmental Protection Agency, establishing the Chevron deference doctrine in future cases of statutory interpretation.

In offering background on the landmark Chevron case, Bamzai boiled it down to a question of scope.

“My own view is that the fundamental principle and issue of the Chevron opinion — whether and when courts should give weight to the legal interpretation articulated by agencies — has been around for centuries, both before and since Chevron, and it won’t go away,” Bamzai said.

Bamzai spoke about the different perspectives on the scope of Chevron, beginning with the two-step process, commonly known as the Chevron deference doctrine.

Long associated with Scalia, the two-step deference doctrine that the court adopted in the Chevron case established a framework for when courts should defer to an agency’s construction of a statute it administers.

“Chevron said that the first step was whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question,” Bamzai explained. “If Congress’s intent is clear it must be given fact, and as for how to establish that intent, Chevron said that a court should employ traditional tools of statutory construction.”

An alternative perspective, according to Bamzai, “would have treated the framework in a much more conceptual manner, perhaps even reserving pure questions of statutory construction for the courts to decide.”

In reconciling two approaches to defining scope — the rigid two-step process and a more conceptual framework — Bamzai argued for finding an appropriate balance to better approach court cases.

“Perhaps the duty of people who are outside of the judiciary is to hold the feet to the fire in terms of, ‘Let’s focus on the conceptual issues,’” he said.