The Obama administration has ambitiously asserted, as an application of Title IX, that schools nationwide must make available to transgender students the general bathroom facilities that correspond to their gender identity. To resolve a case now up for Supreme Court review, it is not necessary to reach the merits of this policy; the promulgation of the new policy by guidance letter, without advance notice, chance for public comment and other protections for regulated parties, is enough of a defect to strike it down. [Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald on Cato Institute amicus brief, with law professors Jonathan Adler, Richard Epstein, and Michael McConnell, supporting certiorari review in Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.]
[The Education Department] seeks to change federal law not through notice-and-comment rulemaking as required by the Administrative Procedure Act, but through an informal, unpublished letter written by a low-level bureaucrat. …We call on the Court to take this opportunity to overrule Auer and declare that the judiciary will no longer blindly accept self-serving agency interpretations, but make their own independent determinations based on a searching and reasoned reading of the regulations at issue. Should the Court choose not to overrule Auer, we suggest that—at minimum—it hold that only agency interpretations that have received the public scrutiny of notice-and-comment rulemaking merit judicial deference.
More on Auer deference here, etc.
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