Abstract
Administrative law is in flux and its doctrines flexible. Recent doctrinal shifts—like the ousting of Chevron and the introduction of the major questions doctrine—raise significant questions about how courts will determine the best reading of statutes and carve out a role for agency expertise in statutory interpretation. For environmental law, a field that relies heavily on federal agencies for implementation, the flux and flexibility of administrative law presents challenges. But they also present opportunities.
On the one hand, the recent changes to administrative law pose a destabilizing and deregulatory risk for environmental law unless courts develop a consistent methodology for statutory interpretation. On the other hand, the recent changes provide an opportunity for administrative law and environmental law to function together better than they have in the past.
This article offers a path forward that makes environmental law more stable and predictable. It does so by offering up a series of textually- defensible rebuttable presumptions that courts can use to guide their determination of the best reading of environmental statutes. These presumptions are meant to stabilize environmental law so that fundamental regulatory questions are not subject to the changing winds of agency deference or jurisprudential philosophies about the wisdom of the administrative state. These presumptions are also meant to make environmental law more predictable in a way that champions the vision of these laws at the time of their enactment—that is, as science-driven, technology-forcing, public interest minded, problem-solving precautionary statutes.
Recommended Citation
Sanne H. Knudsen,
A Guide to the Best Reading of Environmental Law: Presumptions for Stability in Statutory Interpretation,
15
Mich. J. Env't. & Admin. L.
232
(2026).
Available at:
https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjeal/vol15/iss2/4