The Clean Air Act and the Constitution

On February 27, 2001, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Clean Air Act against a constitutional challenge based on the nondelegation doctrine. The Court held that the Act provided the requisite “intelligible principle” for assignments of authority to the executive, and it also held that the D.C. Circuit had erred in allowing an administrative agency to decide the scope of its own authority under what that court had held was an impermissibly broad assignment of authority. This article was written before the Supreme Court issued its decision.