To: Associate. From: Supervising attorney. Re: Ridgeway Freight Lines v. the agency, opening brief.
The (invented) Freight Facilities Act requires carriers to register each “terminal, depot, warehouse, or other transport facility” they use. The agency's new rule reads “transport facility” to include any lot where a carrier's trucks park, and it fined our client, Ridgeway Freight Lines, for not registering the leased lots where its employees park their own cars. Ridgeway and the Act are invented for this exercise.
Please draft Point I of our opening brief: a point heading and two or three paragraphs arguing that the court decides what “transport facility” means without deferring to the agency, and that, read in context, the phrase does not reach employee parking lots.
Use only the authorities in the library and give each citation in the form The Citation Code gives for a brief. Be careful how you describe Yates: a plurality's reasoning is not a holding.
The client, the statute and the rule are invented for practice. The authorities are real public-domain opinions, and their citations are verified.
Library
Each citation is in the book's form. Pinpoints and history are yours to add.
Loper Bright (2024)
Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024).
Page 412: the Court overrules Chevron and says that courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and may not defer to an agency's reading simply because a statute is ambiguous.
Yates (2015)
Yates v. United States, 574 U.S. 528 (2015) (plurality opinion).
Page 536: a plurality of the Court read “tangible object” in a document-destruction statute to cover only objects used to record or preserve information, not every physical object the words could describe.
Four Justices in all joined that opinion, so its reasoning is a plurality's. Describe what it read or reasoned; do not say it held.
Self-review
Read your draft against each line and tick it when it holds. 0 of 5 ticked; the ticks stay in this browser.
Point I's heading is a full sentence that tells the court what to decide and why.
If not: Rewrite a topic-label heading (“Deference”) as a conclusion the court can adopt.
Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 412 (2024) and Yates v. United States, 574 U.S. 528, 536 (2015) (plurality opinion) each appear in full the first time.
If not: Give the full citation, with its pinpoint, the first time each case is cited.
The Yates citation carries (plurality opinion), and your sentence says the plurality read or reasoned, never that the Court held.
If not: Change held to read or reasoned, and add the opinion-type parenthetical.
When you return to Loper Bright after citing Yates, you write Loper Bright, 603 U.S. at 412, not Id.
If not: Read each Id. upward: if another case sits in between, use the short form.
You tie the neighboring words (terminal, depot, warehouse) to the employee lots and explain why the lots are not like them.
If not: Add one sentence that applies the reasoning to Ridgeway's lots.
Write your own first: the model is one good answer, not the only one.
I. THE COURT DECIDES WHAT “TRANSPORT FACILITY” MEANS, AND READ WITH THE WORDS AROUND IT, THE PHRASE DOES NOT REACH LOTS WHERE EMPLOYEES PARK THEIR OWN CARS.
The agency's reading of the Act gets no deference. A court must exercise its independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and a statute's ambiguity is not a reason to defer. Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 412 (2024). The question is therefore what the Act means, not whether the agency's reading is a permissible one.
Read in context, “other transport facility” takes its meaning from the list it ends. Broad words do not always carry their broadest sense: a plurality of the Supreme Court read “tangible object” in a document-destruction statute to cover only objects used to record or preserve information, not every physical object the words could describe. Yates v. United States, 574 U.S. 528, 536 (2015) (plurality opinion). The Act's words call for the same care. Terminals, depots and warehouses are places where freight is received, stored or transferred, and an “other transport facility” is another place of that kind. A lot where employees leave their own cars handles no freight at all.
Because the court reads the Act itself, Loper Bright, 603 U.S. at 412, and because the Act's words do not reach Ridgeway's employee lots, the fine should be vacated.
Write the first argument point of a brief challenging an agency's broad reading of a statutory phrase.
Write in the box below. Italicize case names with the I button. When you are ready, check your citations, then compare your draft with the self-review list and the model answer in the task file.
Point I
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Brief: read the statute in context — The Citation Code