Noah Feldman, Columnist

This Supreme Court Decision Should Worry the EPA and FDA

The justices upheld the ability of Congress to give federal agencies discretion, but clouds are gathering for the administrative state.

June 22, 2019 at 2:35 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

It’s getting stormy.
Photographer: Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg

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Amid the flood of opinions the U.S. Supreme Court is releasing in the last two weeks of its term, it would be easy to neglect Gundy v. U.S., in which the court very narrowly upheld a federal law that allows the attorney general to decide whether to require registration by sex offenders who were convicted before the passage of the registration law.

But ignoring the Gundy case would be an unfortunate mistake. What matters about it isn’t so much its consequences for sex offenders, or even its unexceptional outcome. What matters is the dissent by Justice Neil Gorsuch, which forms an important bridgehead in the conservative assault on the administrative state.