42 U.S.C. § 1983 · 28 U.S.C. § 1331 · Thompson v. Clark

For forty years, Chevron told federal courts to step aside. When a statute was ambiguous, judges were to defer to the agency's "reasonable" interpretation. That deference quietly decided who could sue, where, and for what — it shaped jurisdiction and it shaped liability.

In 2024, the Supreme Court ended it. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court held that courts — not agencies — must say what the law is. The judiciary reclaimed the interpretive power the Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act gave it. The agency's thumb is off the scale.

No deference is, in practice, no automatic shield.

Here is the through-line for the citizen litigant. Jurisdiction is the courthouse door — and an agency can no longer narrow that door by reinterpreting a statute in its own favor. Where the text gives you a cause of action, a court must read the text, independently, and let you in. And liability follows the same logic: when an official acts beyond what the statute actually authorizes, "the agency said so" is no longer the end of the analysis. A government actor who exceeds the law is exposed to it.

That is the spirit of Thompson v. Clark too — strip away the manufactured barriers and let the merits be heard. A free society does not hide jurisdiction behind a bureaucrat's gloss, and it does not let liability evaporate because a government office wrote a favorable footnote. The law is the law. Read it plainly. File accordingly.