Jonathan Brightbill Provides Insights on SCOTUS EPA Ruling

Chair of Winston & Strawn’s Environmental Litigation & Enforcement group, Jonathan Brightbill, spoke to various news outlets about the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v. EPA, which determined that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not have authority under the Clean Air Act to implement a nationwide cap-and-trade program for the electricity sector.

Having argued the case for the government while in the D.C. Circuit during the prior administration, Jonathan told the Texas Tribune that “[t]oday’s ruling is one of the most significant developments in administrative law” in many years.”

In conversation with Law360, Jonathan said that what “the majority did was collect existing considerations ‘that were, up until now, ad hoc, and incorporate them together into a coherent theory’ for determining whether to utilize the Chevron framework.” The “opinion does nothing directly to change the Chevron doctrine or implementation of Chevron deference,” he told Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, but it “will ultimately have an effect, however, on how courts review agency rulemakings and will tend to result in courts granting agencies Chevron deference less often.”

“Any administrative agencies that are proposing to reinterpret their statutory authority to do novel things are potentially affected by this,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

The SEC could be one of the agencies impacted, Jonathan told InformationWeek. As reviewing courts begin to examine climate-related financial disclosure rules, they “are going to look to the Supreme Court’s major questions doctrine from the West Virginia v. EPA case to say, ‘Hey, is this something that the SEC has done historically and how close an analog is this program to what the SEC has done and required historically?’”

Read the full articles here:

• Texas Tribune
• Law360
• The Wall Street Journal
• Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly (subscription required)
• InformationWeek

For a more detailed analysis, read Winston’s Environmental Law Update blog.