The Changing Federal and Wisconsin Law of Judicial Deference to Administrative Agencies

The matter of judicial deference to administrative agencies’ interpretations of law has seen notable developments both in Wisconsin and at the federal level in recent years. James B. Speta, the Elizabeth Froehling Horner professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, recently participated in a panel on the topic at the State Bar of Wisconsin’s Annual Meeting and Convention and developed his remarks into this guest post appearing on the Marquette Law School Faculty Blog on October 1, 2025.

Very near the end of its term last year, on June 28, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down one of its most significant administrative law decisions ever. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024) overruled one of the Court’s own precedents, which it had relied upon for 40 years in more than a hundred decisions and which had been cited in nearly 20,000 lower court decisions. Yet not only was Loper Bright not a great surprise in federal administrative law, but it was in many ways anticipated by a decision issued by the Wisconsin Supreme Court interpreting that state’s administrative law six years earlier, Tetra Tech EC, Inc. v. Wisconsin Department of Revenue (2018).

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Cigarette Packaging and Smokers’ Rights

I had the delightful opportunity at the beginning of the summer to deliver a conference paper in Portugal.  Lisbon’s cobblestone alleyways and bustling riverfront were exciting, but odd as it might seem, Portuguese cigarette packaging also caught my eye.

All cigarette packs in Portugal have graphic images related to the dangers of smoking cigarettes: rotted teeth, amputated toes, diseased lungs, stitched-up chests, and naked corpses sprawled out on coroners’ metal tables.  The images and the accompanying verbal warnings take up the fronts and backs of the packs, and brand names such as “Marlboro” appear only on the narrow bottoms of the packs.

None of the Portuguese smokers to whom I spoke – and there were plenty – seemed particularly offended by the packaging.  So-called “scare messages,” after all, are genuinely intended to get smokers to stop.  They are consistent with the World Health Organization’ s directives regarding cigarette packaging, and graphic images appear on cigarette packs in most European countries.

What about graphic images in the United States?  It briefly seemed that they would begin appearing after the passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act in 2009.  The Act in fact mandated them, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) formally approved nine graphic images that it considered especially likely to make people afraid of smoking.

However, the tobacco industry and assorted neo-liberal pundits immediately rose up in arms.  The former, of course, worried about its profits, and the latter championed the “right to smoke.”  The graphic warnings, the pundits argued, interfered with freedom of choice.  They were the efforts of the nefarious “nanny state.”

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The Costs of Janus v. AFSCME

Photo of statue depicting a bust of Janus, the two-headed Roman God.On April 10 I participated in a panel discussion sponsored by the Law School Chapter of the Federalist Society.  The presentation was entitled “Lawyers, Plaintiffs, and Professors, Oh My!: Janus v. AFSCME.”  The other panelists were Adjunct Professor and Director of the Law Library Elana Olson, Alumnus Daniel Suhr from the Liberty Justice Center , and Mark Janus, the name plaintiff in the case of Janus v. AFSCME.  What follows are my prepared remarks.

In June of 2018 the United States Supreme Court held, in the case of Janus v. AFSCME, that it is a violation of the First Amendment for State and public sector unions to assess mandatory agency fees to non-consenting employees.  The majority of the Court held that forcing non-union workers to contribute money to support non-political activities which benefit all workers violates the Free Speech rights of non-consenting employees.

In so holding, the Court overruled a precedent of over 40 years, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, a 1977 case that had upheld the practice against a First Amendment challenge.

Opposition to labor unions and collective bargaining rights is a policy choice held by many political conservatives today, but it was not always the position of the Republican Party.  One of the early icons of the conservative political movement in the United States, Whittaker Chambers, was himself a union member at times in his career, he was supportive of the labor movement, and his wife and many of his relatives were union members.

This icon of political conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s supported collective bargaining rights so much, that when the parent of the conservative National Review Magazine gave an award named after Whittaker Chambers to our guest Mark Janus, in recognition of his participation in the Janus v. AFSCME litigation, the family of Whittaker Chambers objected to their father’s name being associated with the case.

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