Introduction
For more than 200 years, the United States and its various jurisdictions have operated under a framework where, when disagreements on the true meaning of a law exist, courts will be the only government branch authorized to interpret those laws and inform the rest of society as to their final, legally binding meaning and effect. This is judicial review.
Established as a bedrock component of American jurisprudential law since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, judicial review demands that there can only be one interpreter of the law whose words carry adjudicatory finality, and that that interpretive power belongs only to the judicial branch. Judicial deference is a practice that intentionally strips this exclusive interpretive authority from the judiciary and hands it to agency employees in the executive bureaucracy.
This publication examines the modern doctrine of judicial deference in the federal and state judiciaries and the growing movement among states to restore independent judicial review. It is intended to provide lawmakers and policy stakeholders with a comprehensive understanding of how deference operates, why it has become a major structural issue in administrative law, and how states are responding in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn its own 40-year-old mandatory deference framework.
The report outlines the legal foundations and practical consequences of deference doctrines, surveys the current state-level landscape nationwide, and highlights legislative solutions designed to reestablish the judiciary’s constitutional role as an independent branch of government. Ultimately, this publication seeks to clarify both the stakes of the deference practice and the pathways available to states pursuing meaningful structural reform.