Rulings, including the Chevron decision, will have ripple effects for enforcing and creating regulations.

Four recent decisions from the US supreme court have unleashed the greatest changes to the American regulatory state in decades and will probably affect responses to emerging threats like the bird flu outbreak currently spreading in the country, experts say.

The decisions will have ripple effects for enforcing and creating regulations, including complicated technical and scientific rules, and they could open up agencies to increased legal challenges.

“Limitations on the administrative state sound like a very mundane and even boring topic, but there’s nothing that the supreme court’s decided that’s more important,” said Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. “I don’t think you can underestimate the threat that it’s going to have to Americans’ everyday lives.” Read more at The Guardian.