Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Encino Motors turns up as a critical precedent in a recent federal judge's decision about DACA/Dreamers. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-otc-daca/how-an-obscure-scotus-employment-ruling-put-the-brakes-on-daca-rollback-idUSKBN1EZ2Y6 I wrote about the ENCINO decision here, a year and a half ago, in one of my end-of-session round ups of the big SCOTUS cases. http://jamesian58.blogspot.com/2016/07/continuing-discussion-of-supreme-courts.html The significance of ENCINO is simply that SCOTUS is cutting back on the amount of deference it thinks is due to the executive branch under the CHEVRON doctrine. Whether that's a good or a bad development depends as always on the answer to the question "who do you trust?" A more interesting question philosophically is why CHEVRON deference came about, and had the sort of run it has had since 1984.

As promised, I'll write today of some of SCOTUS' wrestling this term with issues of statutory construction. In the realm of Labor Law, this was the term of  Encino Motorcars v. Navarro , a case that turns on the meaning of an exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act. This is important, even though the specific category of worker involved may not include very many people, because the New Deal era legislation continues to provide a classification system in a dynamic world of work. The relevant requirement of the FLSA is that which requires overtime pay  for workers who don't fall within exemptions., and that exempts "any salesman, partsman, or mechanic primarily engaged in selling or servicing automobiles trucks, or farm implements...." if employed by a dealership primarily engaged in selling said autos or implements. The specific problem is that auto dealers including the petitioner Encino nowadays employ so-called "service advisors."  As the ...