Rieth-Riley Construction Co., Inc. v. National Labor Relations Board, et al.

Many federal agencies create rules of conduct through adjudication. “The National Labor Relations Board,” however, “uniquely among major federal administrative agencies, has chosen to promulgate virtually all the legal rules in its field through adjudication rather than rulemaking.” Allentown Mack Sales & Serv., Inc. v. NLRB, 522 U.S. 359, 374 (1998). In this case, the NLRB interpreted a rule that it had previously created by adjudication, and Petitioner challenged that interpretation as inconsistent with the rule’s plain text. In rejecting that argument, the Sixth Circuit held that it need not construe agency decisions announcing adjudicative rules “like statutes.” This raises an important question of federal law that has not been, but should be, settled by this Court. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, a reviewing court “shall . . . determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action”—a term that includes an agency’s own rules, whether announced through notice-and-comment rulemaking or adjudicative order. 5 U.S.C. §§ 706, 701(b)(2), 551(13). This Court has held, moreover, that reviewing courts are entitled to take the NLRB’s adjudicative standards “to mean what they say, and to conduct substantial-evidence review on that basis,” Allentown Mack, 522 U.S. at 376–77, and that courts must exercise independent judgment—applying at the outset all traditional tools of construction—when reviewing an agency’s interpretation of a statute, Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 394, 403–04 (2024), or its own regulations, Kisor v. Wilkie, 588 U.S. 558, 575 (2019). The question presented is: Whether a reviewing court must independently interpret a standard of conduct that an agency announced through adjudication.