The Supreme Court secretly includes an attack on the abortion pill in its latest ruling.

This is part of OpinionpaloozaSlate’s coverage of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions in June. In addition to AmicusThis year we started to explain How originalism devoured the lawThe best way to support our work is through membership Slate Plus. (If you are already a member, consider donation or Merchandise!)

Amid a spate of Supreme Court decisions destabilizing the system as we know it, many people may have missed a seemingly routine case in which the Court ruled on whether a lawsuit challenging a federal agency’s regulation was timely filed. In that case, Corner Post against the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Systemthe court ruled that a federal law imposing a six-year time limit on suing the government allows a company to challenge a federal regulation long after it goes into effect because the challenge is made within six years of the date the company—which was founded several years after the regulation was issued—was first harmed by the regulation. In doing so, the court’s six-judge conservative supermajority contradicted every federal appeals court that had directly addressed the same issue and opened the court’s doors to challenges to long-standing, long-established agency regulations.

Before Corner postthe federal courts’ position on the required timing of a challenge to an agency rule was clear: parties seeking to file a prima facie challenge—that is, a challenge challenging the legality of a rule as applied to any person, not to a specific person or entity under specific circumstances—had to do so within six years of the date of publication of the final rule. This approach promoted legal stability by assuring agencies, Congress, regulated entities, and everyone else that the legal status of a rule would be cemented within six years of its final adoption. Now, after Corner postAnyone with a brand new complaint against a regulation, regardless of how long the regulation has been in effect, can file a lawsuit to overturn it.

To understand how revolutionary the Supreme Court’s decision in Corner post will be, consider another (seemingly unrelated) case from the Court’s most recent term. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine against FDAAn anti-abortion group and its affiliated physicians challenged both the FDA’s original 2000 approval of the drug mifepristone, used to induce abortions, and the agency’s more recent tweaks to the drug’s prescribing and administration protocols. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk – a federal judge in Texas known as an opponent of both abortion and government regulation – ruled that the FDA’s original approval of mifepristone was unlawful and that removing the drug from the market was the proper remedy. The federal appeals court in Texas dismissed Kacsmaryk’s reversal of the FDA’s original approval of mifepristone not because it found Kacsmaryk’s decision to be factually incorrect, but because the lawsuit challenging the approval was not filed within six years of the FDA’s final decision to approve the drug.

As soon as the anti-abortion groups regroup and find a person or organization that, unlike the plaintiffs, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicinehas standing to sue, you can be sure that they will renew their challenge to the original FDA approval of mifepristone a quarter century ago. Corner post will be there to speed them along their path. (This is probably no coincidence. The same law firm that represented Corner Post before the Supreme Court, Consovoy McCarthy, also represented anti-abortion groups in Alliance for Hippocratic MedicineIt would be naive to assume that the connection between Corner post and mifepristone went unnoticed by one of the most important lawyers in the conservative legal movement.)

The potential for disruption caused by Corner post is determined by the decision of the Court in Loper Bright Enterprises v. RaimondoRepeal Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Whereas Chevron had instructed the courts to defer to the authorities’ reasonable interpretation of ambiguous laws, Loper Bright now prohibits courts from subordinating themselves to the offices, and proclaims that every law has one – and only one – best and permissible meaning, which must be determined by judges and not administrators. There are thousands of long-standing office rules that have been interpreted by courts on the basis of the ChevronThere are also almost certainly countless long-standing rules whose legal basis was not even questioned when they came into force, due to the strength and prevalence of Chevron Respect. All of these rules are now vulnerable to lawsuits from newly aggrieved litigants, thanks to the combination of Corner post And Loper Bright.

The attempts of the conservative judges in these cases To simply dismiss concerns about legal instability and the increasing number of legal cases against the government is ridiculous. Loper Brightafter evisceration ChevronChief Justice John Roberts promised that the court would not question its previous cases in which it upheld the authorities’ decisions based on Chevron. It is strange that the less important decisions, each upholding only one rule, seem to deserve more precedential value than the blockbuster case that dominated administrative law for 40 years. Even setting that aside, it is hard to believe the Court’s reassurance about stare decisis in the midst of a decision that disregards stare decisis. And the Court’s sworn promise about the continuing validity of its own cases, which rely on Chevron says nothing about what the lower courts will do with their own, far more extensive precedent Chevron. Will the US Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit – where federal regulations die – clings to its previous Chevron-based treatments of long-standing agency rules? Don’t hold your breath.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s appeasements in her majority opinion in Corner post are equally hollow. She also believes that stare decisis will largely allay concerns about legal instability and the workload of the judiciary. New challenges to old rules are often resolved, she observes, by binding precedents at the level of the Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court. This raises the question of how binding the courts will consider their precedent when it is based on Chevron. Moreover, since not all district courts hear every challenge to a rule, and the Supreme Court hears only about 60 cases a year, well-funded litigants will almost always be able to find a comfortable and precedent-free venue to bring a challenge to a long-standing rule. In some Texas federal courts, they can even make their own Judge.