On June 28, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling overturning “Chevron deference,” a tool for interpreting ambiguous statutes administered by administrative agencies.  The 40-year-old Chevron doctrine held that, where a court finds a statute to be silent or ambiguous on a particular matter, the court must defer to the relevant agency’s construction of the statute if that construction is “permissible.”  The Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo now rejects any such deference to the agency and requires courts to apply their own construction of the silent or ambiguous law, even if the agency’s contrary view is reasonable and “permissible.”

Yesterday, the SEC voluntarily stayed its new ESG disclosure rules for public companies pending the outcome of several lawsuits that have been filed, which are now consolidated in the 8^th Circuit US Court of Appeals. We blogged earlier about the emergence of several lawsuits filed in different federal circuits. What does this mean? We believe that it means that the SEC wanted to avoid the delay that could result from extensive briefing on a potential court injunction staying the effectiveness of the rules, and move immediately to the merits, in hopes of resolving the litigation a reasonable period before the first effective date for many companies to begin compliance for their 2025 fiscal years. If the SEC prevails and the matter is resolved on a speedy basis, then the SEC has a chance to move forward with the rules on its original schedule, but the odds of that seem 50-50 at best.