Gorsuch, J., concurring in judgment
States 41–42; Harrison, 37 Yale J. Reg. Bull., at 46. The anomaly dissipates, however, if we read §706(2) as instructing courts about when they must disregard agency action in the process of deciding a case.
Imagine what else it would mean if §706(2) really did authorize vacatur. Ordinary joinder and class-action procedures would become essentially irrelevant in administrative litigation. Why bother jumping through those hoops when a single plaintiff can secure a remedy that rules the world? See Bray, 131 Harv. L. Rev., at 464–465. Surely, too, it is odd that leading scholars who wrote extensively about the APA after its adoption apparently never noticed this supposed remedy. See J. Harrison, Vacatur of Rules Under the Administrative Procedure Act, 40 Yale J. Reg. Bull. 119, 127–128 (2023) (discussing scholarship of Professors Kenneth Culp Davis and Louis Jaffe); see also Department of Justice, Attorney General’s Manual on the Administrative Procedure Act 108 (1947) (offering the Executive Branch’s view that §706 simply “restates the present law as to the scope of judicial review”). These are not people who would have missed such a major development in their field.
C
As always, there are arguments on the other side of the ledger, and the States tee up several. They first reply that §706(2) must allow vacatur of agency action because the APA models judicial review of agency action on appellate review of judgments, and appellate courts sometimes vacate judgments. Brief for Respondents 40. But just because “Congress may sometimes refer to collateral judicial review of executive action as ‘an appeal’ … does not make it an ‘appeal’ akin to that taken from the district court to the court of appeals.” Garland v. Ming Dai, 593 U. S. ___, ___ (2021) (slip op., at 9). Nor does any of that tell us in which respects the APA models judicial review of agency action on appellate review of lower court judgments. According to one
