A group of California commercial fishing organizations asked the U.S. Supreme Court this week to reverse a Ninth Circuit decision that expands the scope of the “Chevron deference doctrine.”

In the 1984 case of Chevron USA Inc. v. NRDC, the Supreme Court ruled that agencies must be given deference in their interpretation of ambiguous statutes so long as the interpretation is “reasonable.”

In the case at issue, the Pacific Legal Foundation filed a petition to ask the Supreme Court to reverse a decision that upheld the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s interpretation of an environmental statute, because the law was “silent” on the relevant legal question rather than “ambiguous.” PLF, joined by the California Sea Urchin Commission, California Abalone Association, and others, argue that statutory silence is insufficient to grant agencies the deference created by the Chevron doctrine. “The Ninth Circuit’s statutory silence theory does more than transfer large amounts of Congress’s legislative power to administrative agencies,” the commercial fishing groups argued. “It also invites agencies to intrude on the court’s judicial power.”

The case is California Sea Urchin Commission v. Combs, case number 17-1636 in the U.S. Supreme Court.

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