The federal Environmental Protection Agency on Monday cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Loper Bright decision for the idea that judges should be “deferential” to the agency’s scientific “expertise.” 

That may come as a surprise to some, as the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority held in Loper Bright Enterprises Inc. v. Raimondo that courts must not defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous law. The June decision formally overruled four decades of courts deferring to regulators under the doctrine of “Chevron deference.”