The Supreme Court of Ohio recently cited the scholarship of CWRU School of Law Professor Jonathan H. Adler in a decision holding that Ohio courts need not defer to state administrative agency interpretations of state law.
The Court’s opinion in TWISM Enterprises, L.L.C. v. State Board of Registration for Professional Engineers & Surveyors was written by Justice Patrick DeWine and rejected what is called “Chevron deference” for purposes of state law. Under Chevron deference, when a regulatory statute is ambiguous, courts are to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of that statute. Chevron deference has become controversial when applied in federal courts.
Under TWISM Enterprises, Ohio courts will not apply Chevron in state law cases. In TWISM Enterprises, the Ohio Supreme Court quoted and cited Adler’s article “Restoring Chevron’s Domain,” published in 2017 in the Missouri Law Review. In that article, Adler reviews the theoretical underpinnings of Chevron deference and explains how courts could ensure that deference doctrines are applied in a manner consistent with Chevron’s theoretical underpinnings.
Jonathan Adler is the inaugural Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and Director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law. A recent study found that Adler is the fifth most cited professor in administrative and environmental law from 2016-2020.