Ohio v. EPA (contribution to FDLI's top food and drug cases, 2024)
May 1, 2025 - Neal D. Fortin
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The Food & Drug Law Institute (FDLI) publishes an annual list of top food and drug cases.
Neal Fortin, Director of MSU's IFLR, contributed to the 2024 edition with a chapter on Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency.
Read the chapter online at the FDLI website.
Why It Made the List
In a year with major cases that rearranged the landscape of administrative law, the Supreme Court’s emergency docket ruling in Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency may seem like a relatively inconsequential technical matter. The emergency docket decision temporarily paused a not fully implemented EPA Clean Air Act rule. The Court in Ohio concluded that EPA had provided an inadequate response to a single oblique reference within a comment on the proposed rule. This was held to violate the arbitrary and capricious standard of the Administrative Procedure Act.
This case highlights the Court’s willingness to substitute its determinations in complex technical and scientific matters over those of agency scientists. The Court’s hard look at agency actions and its positioning itself as the frontline expert with the authority to decide complex scientific matters will likely impact FDA in coming years. Therefore, the Court’s ruling in Ohio v. EPA makes our list of the top (FDCA-related) cases of 2024 even though it does not directly involve FDA or the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
