Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, throwing out another long-established precedent.

This time, the court overruled not a constitutional right, but a doctrine fundamental to the efficient functioning of our federal government. The doctrine formerly known as “Chevron deference” was championed by the late Justice Antonin Scalia in his intellectual prime.

The rule generally required federal courts to accept the reasonable interpretation of the federal agency responsible for administering a law when that law is unclear. For example, faced with the question what counts as a “source” of air pollution subject to the Clean Air Act, courts were supposed to accept the definition used by the Environmental Protection Agency, as long as it was reasonable.

Now, in Loper Bright, the Supreme Court tells us that the federal Administrative Procedure Act – the central law that provides the default rules of the road for federal agencies – does not permit Chevron deference (and, apparently, never has). Instead, courts must decide for themselves what unclear terms or gaps in the law mean. This is just one more in the line of decisions in which the Supreme Court claims not to be a policymaker while gleefully grabbing more power for the judicial branch – and using it to reject precedent after precedent that does not match its conservative majority’s policy preferences.

Maine can do better.

Maine, too, has a long history of giving what our own Supreme Judicial Court described as “deference to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute that it administers.” As that court has said more than once, it “will not second-guess [an] agency on matters falling within its realm of expertise.” The court has often connected this standard of deference with Chevron.

The anti-regulatory advocates are coming for Maine’s deference regime, too.

True, Maine’s own Administrative Procedure Act, like those of most states, has a lot in common with the federal law that was central to the Supreme Court’s holding on Friday. But as we often remind our students, Maine’s law is far from a carbon copy of its federal forerunner. Indeed, Maine’s law describing how judges review agency actions puts noticeably less emphasis on a judge’s independent judgment on questions of law.

Moreover, Maine’s Legislature is much more involved than Congress in determining what an agency can decide. In Maine, a statute must spell out in advance what kind of rules an agency can adopt under it, and through what process. Even then, the Legislature must usually approve agency rules after they are written in order for them to take effect. It’s particularly clear in Maine, then, when the Legislature means to rely on the judgment and expertise of an agency in interpreting a law. These are all good reasons that Maine’s generalist judiciary has been wise to listen and, accordingly, to defer.

You might wonder if deference even matters. It most assuredly does.

Agencies and those they regulate need to operate with some degree of confidence that their actions will stand and the law will be consistently applied from year to year, from court to court, and even across administrations (unless the agency goes to the trouble of changing it). In a world without deference, the courts become the agencies, substituting their judgment for that of experts in the myriad fields regulated by the executive branch. Do we really want courts deciding detailed and complicated definitional questions of science and medicine?

Some have argued that deference regimes like Chevron may not make a difference in that many cases – that a judge can always find a way to overturn an agency if they disagree with its reading of a statute. Conversely, nothing now prevents a judge from accepting an agency’s legal interpretation that they agree with. And the U.S. Supreme Court has already ignored Chevron in numerous recent important cases. All that is true, as far as it goes. But many good lower-court judges took the Supreme Court at its word in Chevron, accepting agency legal interpretations that they disagreed with but nonetheless found to be reasonable. When a legislature recognized and empowered an agency’s experts to make policy and interpret law, judges followed suit.

There’s wisdom in that restraint. That the federal courts have lost sight of it is no reason for the Maine judiciary to join in the war on expertise that has so polluted politics and policymaking nationwide. There is a better way forward that maintains the tradition of reasonable, bi-partisan governance in our state.