The Fifth Circuit’s decision to send a US Labor Department rule challenge back to district court raises thorny questions about what appeals panels are to do with cases pending on their dockets that cited the recently axed Chevron doctrine. The US Supreme Court’s June 28 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo did away with Chevron, under which courts had to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit opted July 18 to task a lower court with untangling the interpretive issues of a post-Loper Bright reality in a challenge to the DOL’s 401(k) sustainable investing rule. “I think panels will have to grapple with Loper Bright,” said Andrew Kim, an Appellate and Supreme Court Litigation partner at Goodwin, to Bloomberg Law. “By the time that the Utah v. Su case plays itself out, we will have a decent picture from the courts of appeals as to how they’re going to deal with Loper Bright for those other cases caught in the middle.” The absence of the agency deference doctrine also raises concerns about a high volume of litigation targeting the federal government’s legal interpretations, seeking the “best meaning” of statutes described in the Loper Bright decision, Kim said.