Rachel Rothschild (University of Michigan Law) has posted "The Origins of the Major Questions Doctrine." The abstract:
In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has invoked the newly named “major questions doctrine” to strike down agency regulations that protect public health and the environment. Several Justices have argued that while the name “major questions” may be new, these decisions are simply the latest iteration in a longstanding effort of the courts to curtail the explosive growth of the administrative state since 1970. The first, paradigmatic example of this line of cases is the 1980 “benzene” case, in which the Supreme Court set aside the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)’s new workplace standards for the toxic chemical benzene.
This paper argues that we cannot make sense of contemporary debates about the major questions doctrine without a deep understanding of the doctrine’s supposed origins in the benzene case. It relies on hundreds of archival documents and a dozen oral histories collected over several years to provide a historical study of the decision and its aftermath. No other legal scholars or historians have analyzed these materials, which the author amassed from Freedom of Information Act requests as well as visits to government and university archives. They include internal agency documents, court records, and the personal papers of multiple Supreme Court Justices involved in the benzene decision.
Based on this novel set of materials and interviews, the article shows that the Justices’ misunderstanding of OSHA’s scientific evidence and fears of overregulation led them to demand that the agency use a specific analytical method to demonstrate benzene’s harms in order to avoid a constitutional delegation problem. Yet OSHA had decided not to utilize the method – now called quantitative risk assessment – because of insufficient data. The court instead deferred to industry-funded experts with little or no background in environmental and public health research, who argued that the method could be used and would reveal that the rule saved very few lives. The Justices’ embrace of quantitative risk assessment contradicted Congress’s clear desire to avoid industry influence over public health research when passing the OSH Act as well as judicial precedent on deferring to agencies working at the frontiers of scientific knowledge.
Rather than upholding separation of powers principles or agency adherence to the text of its authorizing statute, the Supreme Court’s benzene decision is best characterized as a judicial power grab at the expense of both agency expertise and the democratically elected branches of government. The paper concludes by showing how the Supreme Court’s missteps in the benzene case – exaggeration of economic costs, ignoring statutory constraints on agency discretion, and deferring to unqualified experts – have continued to plague the Supreme Court’s “major questions” decisions, and provides suggestions for how the courts and agencies can avoid these problems.
The full paper is available here.
-- Karen Tani
