The Supreme Court has Made It Harder to Regulate New Technologies -

“However, the way the Supreme Court did this—by recognizing and endorsing the ‘major questions doctrine’—threatens regulation and public policy in the U.S. by allowing judges to pick and choose regulation they think is ‘major’ and then undoing it.”

Why this is important: The Supreme Court is shifting its stance on the regulation of new technologies by recognizing the “major questions doctrine” and giving less deference to the agencies authorized by Congress to speak to certain issues within their general scope. Federal agencies are empowered to interpret the statutes that grant them authority when forming regulations around new technology, and the Court has historically sided with the agencies’ interpretations of the law when it is ambiguous. The “major questions doctrine” embraces the Court’s ability to challenge an agency’s claims of regulatory authority when the issue at hand has broad economic and political significance, essentially overriding their authority and choosing for themselves what is in and out of bounds under an ambiguous Act of Congress.