The scales start off even and it is up to the parties to convince Lady Justice of the merit of their case—facts and law (and nothing else) persuading her to deliver justice.
If you go to the Iowa Judicial Branch’s website, you will see photos that accompany the various announcements of what is going on with Iowa’s court systems. One of the photos depicts a statue of Lady Justice-the allegorical personification of the administration of justice. She is depicted blindfolded and holding a balanced set of scales.
The imagery is powerful: Justice is supposed to be delivered without regard to who the parties are and with a presumption of neutrality in the process. The scales start off even and it is up to the parties to convince Lady Justice of the merit of their case—facts and law (and nothing else) persuading her to deliver justice.
But there is one part of our legal system where, by design, the process starts with the scales out of balance. In administrative law—the rules that govern how the government doles out benefits and regulates the behavior of people and businesses—often the government goes to court with a built-in advantage.
Here is how it works. Suppose you are locked in a legal fight with an administrative agency. The agency says your business has violated a regulation and has levied a fine against you. Under present Iowa law, the agency is often presumed to be right on what it says the law is. In other words, when a judge looks at who is right on the facts and law, the judge is required to defer to what the agency says about the meaning of the laws it enforces.
This doesn’t happen in any other context. You won’t find a court deferring to a landlord about what the law means in a dispute about unpaid rent. Judges won’t defer to an insurance company who refuses to pay a claim. And you can be certain that judges won’t take your word for it if you have any other kind of legal dispute. In all of these cases, the judge will hear the position of both sides and then decide what the law is that applies to that case.
The government should have to play by the same rules. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ended this kind of agency deference for federal administrative agencies. The high court reversed one of its earlier decisions (called Chevron v. EPA) that had invented a deference doctrine for federal administrative law. Getting rid of Chevron deference was an important step forward to rebalance the playing field in federal court.
It is time to do the same in Iowa. Unlike the former doctrine of Chevron deference in federal court (which the U.S. Supreme Court made up), our Iowa doctrine comes from a statute. The Iowa legislature told judges that they had to defer to administrative agencies in many circumstances. So it will take a statute to fix that. House File 36 does just that—it repeals the direction to courts to defer to agencies and goes one important step further. The bill also tells agencies and courts that if there is any doubt about what the law means, they “must exercise any remaining doubt in favor of a reasonable interpretation that limits agency authority.”
This correctly rebalances Iowa administrative law. If the legislature wants to give an agency authority to do something, it needs to spell that out clearly. And agencies must stay within the boundaries of what the legislature has decided. They can’t stretch their wings and gobble up authority, confident that if they go to court the judge will have to presume the agency is right on the law. Agencies won’t be prevented from doing the job given to them by the legislature, but they will be prevented from stepping outside the lines and doing things that our elected representatives told them to do.
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