Abstract
After statehood, the Alaska Supreme Court operated on a blank legal slate. No Alaska precedent, for example, addressed the fundamental question of when courts should defer to an agency’s statutory interpretation. In addressing this issue, the Alaska Supreme Court largely adopted the framework developed by federal courts in the 1950s and 1960s, prior to the emergence of the Chevron doctrine. The federal case law from this era relied on nebulous standards to guide when an agency’s interpretations were subject to the deferential reasonable basis review. Not surprisingly, by adopting that federal jurisprudence, Alaska precedent suffers from the same shortcomings. And while the Chevron doctrine was designed to provide a more predictable analytical framework—based on the “fiction” that whenever a statute is ambiguous, courts are to presume that Congress implicitly delegated interpretative authority to the agency—the doctrine ultimately proved to be unworkable. The Supreme Court finally put an end to the Chevron doctrine in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which announced a test that shares common features with the Alaska Supreme Court’s. Namely, courts are responsible for determining the best reading of a statute but are to give weight to an agency’s interpretation when certain factors are present. Although this framework does not eliminate uncertainty regarding when an agency’s statutory interpretation is subject to the more lenient reasonable basis review, Alaskan courts can refine the jurisprudence in this area by examining how federal courts implement Loper Bright. Thus, Loper Bright has given the Alaska Supreme Court an opportunity to recalibrate its existing case law to achieve a more coherent and predictable jurisprudence.
Citation
Jon W. Katchen & Will R. Crowther,
Anchoring Deference: The Chevron Doctrine, Loper Bright, and Alaska Administrative Law,
42 Alaska Law Review
43-91
(2026)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/alr/vol42/iss1/3