The new “major questions doctrine” (MQD) requires courts to apply a “distinct” approach to statutory interpretation when reviewing challenges to an agency action of “vast economic and political significance.”  Under that approach, courts must assume that such an action exceeds the scope of that agency’s statutory authority unless there exists “clear congressional authorization” for it.  In this Article, we examine whether this new rule for administrative agencies (or what we call the “agency MQD”) implies the existence of a similarly strong constraint on the federal courts’ power to interpret and apply statutes for themselves (or what we call the “judicial MQD”).  That is, we ask whether a principled commitment to the agency MQD requires a further commitment to the idea that courts also cannot implement unclear federal statutes in “major”-seeming ways.

To answer that question, we tease out several potential justifications for the agency MQD and ask, with respect to each justification, whether there exists a coherent basis for distinguishing courts’ rendering of “major” statutory decisions from agencies’ formulation of “major” statutory policies.  We begin with a pair of justifications that are “Congress-protecting” in their orientation:  first, a “semantic” justification that sees the agency MQD as a means of accurately interpreting Congress’s actual statutory commands, and second, an “anti-aggrandizement”