For decades, government agencies held a quiet advantage in court. When a statute or a regulation was unclear, judges were expected to defer to the agency’s own interpretation of it. Since 2022, the Ohio Supreme Court has methodically stripped that advantage away. In a line of decisions that began in 2022 and continued as recently as May 2026, the Ohio Supreme Court has held that judges are never required to defer to a state agency’s reading of the law, shifting interpretive power away from the regulatory bureaucracy and back to the courts.
The foundation was laid in December 2022. Writing for the court in TWISM Enterprises v. State Board of Registration for Professional Engineers and Surveyors, Justice DeWine put it plainly: “it is the role of the judiciary, not administrative agencies, to make the ultimate determination about what the law means. Thus, the judicial branch is never required to defer to an agency’s interpretation of the law.”[s] An agency’s view, the court added, is “simply one consideration a court may sometimes take into account in rendering the court’s own independent judgment as to what the law is.”[s]
That sentence reads like dry administrative law. Its consequences are not. Whoever interprets an ambiguous rule effectively decides what the rule does, and for most of the modern era that power belonged to the agencies themselves.
What deference was, and why it mattered
The doctrine the Ohio Supreme Court rejected has a federal pedigree. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Chevron decision, federal judges who found a statute ambiguous had to accept any reasonable agency interpretation. A companion rule, named for the case Auer v. Robbins, extended similar deference to an agency’s reading of its own regulations. Together they let the administrative state write the rules, interpret the rules, and enforce the rules, with courts standing back whenever the text got murky.
State courts were never bound by Chevron, which governed federal law alone. But many state judiciaries adopted similar deference out of habit and convenience. What makes Ohio’s turn striking is its timing. The Ohio Supreme Court decided TWISM in 2022, about 18 months before the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Chevron in its 2024 Loper Bright decision. Ohio did not follow Washington; it moved before the federal reversal, and it grounded its reasoning in the Ohio Constitution’s own separation of powers rather than in any federal trend.
How the Ohio Supreme Court built its anti-deference doctrine
The case that started it was almost mundane. TWISM Enterprises, a small engineering startup, was denied a certificate to operate because it had designated an independent contractor, paid on a 1099, as its full-time manager rather than a salaried W-2 employee. The state engineering board read the statute and related rule to require a W-2 employee, and a lower court deferred to that reading. The Ohio Supreme Court reversed, finding nothing in the statute that barred an independent contractor from the role, and used the case to announce that mandatory deference had no place in Ohio law.
In 2023, the court extended the principle from statutes to regulations. In re Application of Alamo Solar arose from a fight over two large solar farms in Preble County that the Ohio Power Siting Board had approved. Writing again for the court, Justice DeWine held that “the same separation-of-powers principles that led us to reject Chevron-style deference in TWISM also apply to deference of the Auer variety.”[s] Letting an agency interpret its own regulation, the court warned, “violates the fundamental precept that the power of lawmaking and law exposition should not be concentrated in the same hands.”[s] The operative test was now explicit: “If the text of a regulation is clear, then we apply it as written and stop right there. But if we determine that the text is ambiguous, we may consider the board’s interpretation only for its persuasive power.”[s]
By October 2025 the doctrine reached the workplace. In State ex rel. Berry v. Industrial Commission, a unanimous Ohio Supreme Court applied the framework to workers’ compensation. Curtis Berry was injured when a section of asphalt detached and struck him in a trench he was working in for Underground Utilities, and he sought an additional award for an alleged violation of a specific safety requirement. The court held that “the judicial branch is not required to defer to the commission’s legal interpretations of specific safety requirements,”[s] while leaving the underlying factual disputes for the commission to resolve.
The most recent application came on May 26, 2026, and it showed both the reach and the limits of the rule. In In re Application of Oak Run Solar Project, a divided Ohio Supreme Court splintered over a Madison County solar farm. A plurality led by Justice Fischer affirmed part of the Power Siting Board’s approval and reversed part of it, faulting the board for failing to obtain required visual simulations or sketches of the project’s substations. On the central legal question, the plurality reaffirmed that “whether an order is ‘unlawful’ is a legal question, subject to de novo review,”[s] meaning the court owed the agency no deference on the law. Yet it also reiterated a boundary: “overarching public-policy questions about the general societal value of commercial solar farms are the province of the General Assembly, not this court.”[s]
That distinction is the heart of the doctrine. The Ohio Supreme Court has claimed the final word on what the law means, the legal questions, while still leaving factual findings and policy choices to agencies and the legislature. Doctrine rarely arrives in one dramatic stroke. Much as the corporate personhood doctrine grew from a disputed court headnote into a pillar of constitutional law, Ohio’s anti-deference rule was assembled case by case, each decision widening the last.
Ohio wasn’t alone
The Ohio Supreme Court was early, but it is no longer an outlier. After Loper Bright ended federal Chevron deference in 2024, the shift spread through the states. Ballotpedia reported in April 2026 that at least eight states had restricted state judicial deference since Loper Bright, including 2025 statutory changes in Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Missouri, North Carolina Supreme Court decisions in 2025, and 2026 laws in Kansas and Alabama.[s] By late May, Ballotpedia reported that Georgia had enacted a similar law, making it the third state in 2026, after Kansas and Alabama, to comprehensively end state-level judicial deference.[s] The change is far from universal: K&L Gates’ October 2025 review described state approaches as split among substantial, moderate, inconsistent, and no-deference categories.[s]
North Carolina’s path closely tracked Ohio’s. In its 2025 decision in Mitchell v. University of North Carolina Board of Governors, the state’s high court, in the words of one law review analysis, saw “Justice Dietz explicitly disavow any interpretive rule requiring courts to defer to a state agency’s interpretation of its own regulations,”[s] overturning more than thirty years of contrary precedent. Not every court has joined. Hawaii’s Supreme Court expressly rejected the reasoning of Loper Bright, defending deference to agencies that carry specialized knowledge of the subjects they regulate.[s]
The pattern fits a wider moment in American law, in which courts at every level are reclaiming interpretive authority once handed to the executive branch. Federal judges have struck down sweeping tariffs imposed under emergency economic powers, and the same separation-of-powers arguments now animate national fights over executive orders and birthright citizenship. State supreme courts rewriting the rules of agency deference are one front in that broader contest.
Who wins, and who loses
The immediate winners are parties who challenge agencies in court. A business contesting a permit denial or a regulated professional fighting a licensing board now gets independent judicial review of the law rather than a rubber stamp of the agency’s reading. The losers are the agencies, which can no longer count on courts to back their interpretations when a rule is ambiguous.
The effects do not break cleanly along predictable lines. Employer-side lawyers at Benesch observed that although Ohio’s Berry ruling “somewhat echoes the U.S. Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision limiting deference to federal agencies, its impact is potentially opposite for employers,”[s] because injured workers can now press courts to read safety rules more broadly than the commission might. The same firm warned that Berry “may signal a shift toward reduced judicial deference to other Ohio administrative agencies beyond workers’ compensation.”[s]
Critics see real costs. As a Wake Forest Law Review analysis of the North Carolina ruling summarized the objection, “agencies are subject to greater political accountability than the courts,” and stripping them of deference “invites a surge in litigation, as every disappointed litigant is now encouraged to seek a second bite at the apple through the judicial system.”[s] Generalist judges, the argument runs, lack the technical expertise that agency staff bring to complex regulatory programs.
Other legal systems have drawn the opposite conclusion. In Canada, as the firm Torys noted, “since the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2019 decision in Canada v. Vavilov, the default position in Canadian administrative law has been that administrative decisions are reviewed on a standard of reasonableness,”[s] a deferential posture that obliges agencies to justify themselves but does not hand interpretation back to the judges.
For now, the Ohio Supreme Court has settled the question for Ohio. Judges, not agencies, will say what an ambiguous law means. Whether that produces sharper legal accountability or a flood of second-guessing litigation is the test the next several years will run, and other states are watching how it turns out.
