Abstract

The article describes the peculiar posture of the Supreme Court of the United States in reviewing decisions and rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), considering the doctrines that guided judicial review of federal administrative action in the past decades and highlighting a recurring controversial approach towards environmental interests when deciding about the legitimacy of the agency’s initiatives. Increasing challenges to traditional doctrines, and in particular to the well-known Chevron doctrine, threaten a backlash in environmental protection. According to some views, this might represent a further harm for social justice. However, such challenges do not depart from the overall tensions registered in the Court’s management of judicial review in recent years, particularly when dealing with environmental regulation: here, the EPA’s activism in light of Congressional delegations has been often restricted under the affirmation of innovative judicial doctrines. As the following overview will suggest, Justices tend to discharge both relevant environmental concerns and traditional statutory interpretation rules when dealing with the EPA’s decisions, drawing each time a pretendedly impartial form in order to preserve the very clear substance of the protection of economic concerns over environmental purposes.