One of the big stories of last year’s Supreme Court term was the Loper Bright case, which overturned the Chevron doctrine and reasserted the power of courts to decide what the law means without having to defer to administrative agencies judging the scope of their own power.

Loper Bright involved the Administrative Procedure Act, but today in McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates v. McKesson Corporation, involving a different statutory context, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion for the six-justice conservative majority came to the same conclusion and described the Loper Bright rule as one of the “fundamental principles of administrative law”:

Fundamental principles of administrative law establish the proper default rule: In an enforcement proceeding, a district court must independently determine for itself whether the agency’s interpretation of a statute is correct. District courts are not bound by the agency’s interpretation, but instead must determine the meaning of the law under ordinary principles of statutory interpretation, affording appropriate respect to the agency’s interpretation. See Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U. S. 369, 402 (2024).

McLaughlin Chiropractic (no relation) involved that unending source of nuisance litigation, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which allows suits to recover a statutory penalty every time a defendant sends an unsolicited fax. Who still sends faxes, you may ask? That’s actually a relevant question in this case (which involves faxes sent in 2009–2010), because a number of the faxes at issue went to online services that deliver faxes by email or similar sources rather than by unspooling shiny paper. Given the differences in such technology — a virtual fax is not as wasteful of paper and doesn’t clog your incoming fax line — the Federal Communications Commission ruled in 2019 that “an online fax service is not a ‘telephone facsimile machine’” within the meaning of the TCPA.

Under the Hobbs Act, courts have ruled that certain binding rulings of administrative agencies can be challenged only in pre-enforcement lawsuits in the courts of appeals. Because the FCC ruling came up in an unrelated administrative proceeding, the district court in the TCPA class action — having no jurisdiction over a Hobbs Act challenge to the FCC decision as a whole — concluded that it was bound by the FCC’s ruling. The Court, however, rejected that view: “The Hobbs Act does not preclude district courts in enforcement proceedings from independently assessing whether an agency’s interpretation of the relevant statute is correct. Here, therefore, the District Court should interpret the TCPA under ordinary principles of statutory interpretation, affording appropriate respect to the agency’s interpretation.”

Of course, if a Hobbs Act challenge is filed, that may lead to a judicial precedent that will be binding in other lawsuits. That’s still the best way for regulated parties to avoid the whipsaw where an agency says one thing, and then a court in a completely different case says something else — possibly, as in this case, exposing regulated entities to a lot of damages exposure for something the agency says is legal. Kavanaugh set aside the situation where Congress expressly limits the paths to judicial review, as in CERCLA or Clean Water Act cases, but didn’t suggest that Congress could constitutionally bind courts to follow agency interpretations — a question Loper Bright didn’t reach because it decided the matter on statutory grounds. The Court also declined to decide whether the FCC is actually right about online faxes. That means the case will head back to a district judge who will probably have to explain to his or her twentysomething law clerks what a fax was.