Grants Pass, Oregon, is home to roughly 38,000 people, about 600 of whom are estimated to experience homelessness on a given day. Like many local governments across the Nation, Grants Pass has public-camping laws that restrict encampments on public property. The Grants Pass Municipal Code prohibits activities such as camping on public property or parking overnight in the city’s parks. See §§5.61.030, 6.46.090(A)–(B). Initial violations can trigger a fine, while multiple violations can result in imprisonment. In a prior decision, Martin v. Boise, the Ninth Circuit held that the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause bars cities from enforcing public-camping ordinances like these against homeless individuals whenever the number of homeless individuals in a jurisdiction exceeds the number of “practically available” shelter beds. 920 F. 3d 584, 617. After Martin, suits against Western cities like Grants Pass proliferated.

   Plaintiffs (respondents here) filed a putative class action on behalf of homeless people living in Grants Pass, claiming that the city’s ordinances against public camping violated the Eighth Amendment. The district court certified the class and entered a Martin injunction prohibiting Grants Pass from enforcing its laws against homeless individuals in the city. App. to Pet. for Cert. 182a–183a. Applying Martin’s reasoning, the district court found everyone without shelter in Grants Pass was “involuntarily homeless” because the city’s total homeless population outnumbered its “practically available” shelter beds. App. to Pet. for Cert. 179a, 216a. The beds at Grants Pass’s charity-run shelter did not qualify as “available” in part because that shelter has rules requiring residents to abstain from smoking and to attend religious services. App. to Pet. for Cert. 179a–180a. A divided panel of the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s Martin injunction in relevant part. 72 F. 4th 868, 874–896. Grants Pass filed a petition for certiorari. Many States, cities, and counties from across the Ninth Circuit urged the Court to grant review to assess Martin.

Held: The enforcement of generally applicable laws regulating camping on public property does not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. Pp. 15–35.

  (a) The Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause “has always been considered, and properly so, to be directed at the method or kind of punishment” a government may “impos[e] for the violation of criminal statutes.” Powell v. Texas, 392 U. S. 514, 531–532 (plurality opinion). It was adopted to ensure that the new Nation would never resort to certain “formerly tolerated” punishments considered “cruel” because they were calculated to “ ‘superad[d]’ ” “ ‘terror, pain, or disgrace,’ ” and considered “unusual” because, by the time of the Amendment’s adoption, they had “long fallen out of use.” Bucklew v. Precythe, 587 U. S 119, 130. All that would seem to make the Eighth Amendment a poor foundation on which to rest the kind of decree the plaintiffs seek in this case and the Ninth Circuit has endorsed since Martin. The Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause focuses on the question what “method or kind of punishment” a government may impose after a criminal conviction, not on the question whether a government may criminalize particular behavior in the first place. Powell, 392 U. S., at 531–532.

  The Court cannot say that the punishments Grants Pass imposes here qualify as cruel and unusual. The city imposes only limited fines for first-time offenders, an order temporarily barring an individual from camping in a public park for repeat offenders, and a maximum sentence of 30 days in jail for those who later violate an order. See Ore. Rev. Stat. §§164.245, 161.615(3). Such punishments do not qualify as cruel because they are not designed to “superad[d]” “terror, pain, or disgrace.” Bucklew, 587 U. S., at 130 (internal quotation marks omitted). Nor are they unusual, because similarly limited fines and jail terms have been and remain among “the usual mode[s]” for punishing criminal offenses throughout the country. Pervear v. Commonwealth, 5 Wall. 475, 480. Indeed, cities and States across the country have long employed similar punishments for similar offenses. Pp. 15–17.

  (b) Plaintiffs do not meaningfully dispute that, on its face, the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause does not speak to questions like what a State may criminalize or how it may go about securing a conviction. Like the Ninth Circuit in Martin, plaintiffs point to Robinson v. California, 370 U. S. 660, as a notable exception. In Robinson, the Court held that under the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, California could not enforce a law providing that “‘[n]o person shall . . . be addicted to the use of narcotics.’” Id., at 660, n 1. While California could not make “the ‘status’ of narcotic addiction a criminal offense,” id., at 666, the Court emphasized that it did not mean to cast doubt on the States’ “broad power” to prohibit behavior even by those, like the defendant, who suffer from addiction. Id., at 664, 667–668. The problem, as the Court saw it, was that California’s law made the status of being an addict a crime. Id., at 666–667 The Court read the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause (in a way unprecedented in 1962) to impose a limit on what a State may criminalize. In dissent, Justice White lamented that the majority had embraced an “application of ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ so novel that” it could not possibly be “ascribe[d] to the Framers of the Constitution.” 370 U. S., at 689. The Court has not applied Robinson in that way since.

  Whatever its persuasive force as an interpretation of the Eighth Amendment, Robinson cannot sustain the Ninth Circuit’s Martin project. Robinson expressly recognized the “broad power” States enjoy over the substance of their criminal laws, stressing that they may criminalize knowing or intentional drug use even by those suffering from addiction. 370 U. S., at 664, 666. The Court held that California’s statute offended the Eighth Amendment only because it criminalized addiction as a status. Ibid.

  Grants Pass’s public-camping ordinances do not criminalize status. The public-camping laws prohibit actions undertaken by any person, regardless of status. It makes no difference whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 159. Because the public-camping laws in this case do not criminalize status, Robinson is not implicated. Pp. 17–21.

  (c) Plaintiffs insist the Court should extend Robinson to prohibit the enforcement of laws that proscribe certain acts that are in some sense “involuntary,” because some homeless individuals cannot help but do what the law forbids. See Brief for Respondents 24–25, 29, 32. The Ninth Circuit pursued this line of thinking below and in Martin, but this Court already rejected it in Powell v. Texas, 392 U. S. 514. In Powell, the Court confronted a defendant who had been convicted under a Texas statute making it a crime to “ ‘get drunk or be found in a state of intoxication in any public place.’ ” Id., at 517 (plurality opinion). Like the plaintiffs here, Powell argued that his drunkenness was an “‘involuntary’” byproduct of his status as an alcoholic. Id., at 533. The Court did not agree that Texas’s law effectively criminalized Powell’s status as an alcoholic. Writing for a plurality, Justice Marshall observed that Robinson’s “very small” intrusion “into the substantive criminal law” prevents States only from enforcing laws that criminalize “a mere status.” Id., at 532–533. It does nothing to curtail a State’s authority to secure a conviction when “the accused has committed some act . . . society has an interest in preventing.” Id., at 533. That remains true, Justice Marshall continued, even if the defendant’s conduct might, “in some sense” be described as “ ‘involuntary’ or ‘occasioned by’” a particular status. Ibid.

  This case is no different. Just as in Powell, plaintiffs here seek to extend Robinson’s rule beyond laws addressing “mere status” to laws addressing actions that, even if undertaken with the requisite mens rea, might “in some sense” qualify as “ ‘involuntary.’ ” And as in Powell, the Court can find nothing in the Eighth Amendment permitting that course. Instead, a variety of other legal doctrines and constitutional provisions work to protect those in the criminal justice system from a conviction. Pp. 21–24.

  (d) Powell not only declined to extend Robinson to “involuntary” acts but also stressed the dangers of doing so. Extending Robinson to cover involuntary acts would, Justice Marshall observed, effectively “impe[l]” this Court “into defining” something akin to a new “insanity test in constitutional terms.” Powell, 392 U. S., at 536. That is because an individual like the defendant in Powell does not dispute that he has committed an otherwise criminal act with the requisite mens rea, yet he seeks to be excused from “moral accountability” because of his “‘condition. ’” Id., at 535–536. Instead, Justice Marshall reasoned, such matters should be left for resolution through the democratic process, and not by “freez[ing]” any particular, judicially preferred approach “into a rigid constitutional mold.” Id., at 537. The Court echoed that last point in Kahler v. Kansas, 589 U. S. 271, in which the Court stressed that questions about whether an individual who committed a proscribed act with the requisite mental state should be “reliev[ed of] responsibility,” id., at 283, due to a lack of “moral culpability,” id., at 286, are generally best resolved by the people and their elected representatives.

  Though doubtless well intended, the Ninth Circuit’s Martin experiment defied these lessons. Answers to questions such as what constitutes “involuntarily” homelessness or when a shelter is “practically available” cannot be found in the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. Nor do federal judges enjoy any special competence to provide them. Cities across the West report that the Ninth Circuit’s involun tariness test has created intolerable uncertainty for them. By extending Robinson beyond the narrow class of pure status crimes, the Ninth Circuit has created a right that has proven “impossible” for judges to delineate except “by fiat.” Powell, 392 U. S., at 534. As Justice Marshall anticipated in Powell, the Ninth Circuit’s rules have produced confusion and they have interfered with “essential considerations of federalism,” by taking from the people and their elected leaders difficult questions traditionally “thought to be the[ir] province.” Id., at 535–536. Pp. 24–34.

  (e) Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it. The question this case presents is whether the Eighth Amendment grants federal judges primary responsibility for assessing those causes and devising those responses. A handful of federal judges cannot begin to “match” the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding “how best to handle” a pressing social question like homelessness. Robinson, 370 U. S., at 689 (White, J., dissenting). The Constitution’s Eighth Amendment serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges to wrest those rights and responsibilities from the American people and in their place dictate this Nation’s homelessness policy. Pp. 34–35.

72 F. 4th 868, reversed and remanded.

 Gorsuch, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Roberts, C. J., and Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., filed a concurring opinion. Sotomayor, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Kagan and Jackson, JJ., joined.

The Court granted certiorari in these cases limited to the question whether Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U. S. 837, should be overruled or clarified. Under the Chevron doctrine, courts have sometimes been required to defer to “permissible” agency interpretations of the statutes those agencies administer—even when a reviewing court reads the statute differently. Id., at 843. In each case below, the reviewing courts applied Chevron’s framework to resolve in favor of the Government challenges by petitioners to a rule promulgated by the National Marine Fisheries Service pursuant to the Magnuson-Stevens Act, 16 U. S. C. §1801 et seq., which incorporates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U. S. C. §551 et seq.

Held: The Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous; Chevron is overruled. Pp. 7–35.

  (a) Article III of the Constitution assigns to the Federal Judiciary the responsibility and power to adjudicate “Cases” and “Controversies”—concrete disputes with consequences for the parties involved. The Framers appreciated that the laws judges would necessarily apply in resolving those disputes would not always be clear, but envisioned that the final “interpretation of the laws” would be “the proper and peculiar province of the courts.” The Federalist No. 78, p. 525 (A. Hamilton). As Chief Justice Marshall declared in the foundational decision of Marbury v. Madison, “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” 1 Cranch 137, 177. In the decades following Marbury, when the meaning of a statute was at issue, the judicial role was to “interpret the act of Congress, in order to ascertain the rights of the parties.” Decatur v. Paulding, 14 Pet. 497, 515.

  The Court recognized from the outset, though, that exercising independent judgment often included according due respect to Executive Branch interpretations of federal statutes. Such respect was thought especially warranted when an Executive Branch interpretation was issued roughly contemporaneously with enactment of the statute and remained consistent over time. The Court also gave “the most respectful consideration” to Executive Branch interpretations simply because “[t]he officers concerned [were] usually able men, and masters of the subject,” who may well have drafted the laws at issue. United States v. Moore, 95 U. S. 760, 763. “Respect,” though, was just that. The views of the Executive Branch could inform the judgment of the Judiciary, but did not supersede it. “[I]n cases where [a court’s] own judgment . . . differ[ed] from that of other high functionaries,” the court was “not at liberty to surrender, or to waive it.” United States v. Dickson, 15 Pet. 141, 162.

  During the “rapid expansion of the administrative process” that took place during the New Deal era, United States v. Morton Salt Co., 338 U. S. 632, 644, the Court often treated agency determinations of fact as binding on the courts, provided that there was “evidence to support the findings,” St. Joseph Stock Yards Co. v. United States, 298 U. S. 38, 51. But the Court did not extend similar deference to agency resolutions of questions of law. “The interpretation of the meaning of statutes, as applied to justiciable controversies,” remained “exclusively a judicial function.” United States v. American Trucking Assns., Inc., 310 U. S. 534, 544. The Court also continued to note that the informed judgment of the Executive Branch could be entitled to “great weight.” Id., at 549. “The weight of such a judgment in a particular case,” the Court observed, would “depend upon the thoroughness evident in its consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give it power to persuade, if lacking power to control.” Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U. S. 134, 140.

  Occasionally during this period, the Court applied deferential review after concluding that a particular statute empowered an agency to decide how a broad statutory term applied to specific facts found by the agency. See Gray v. Powell, 314 U. S. 402; NLRB v. Hearst Publications, Inc., 322 U. S. 111. But such deferential review, which the Court was far from consistent in applying, was cabined to factbound determinations. And the Court did not purport to refashion the longstanding judicial approach to questions of law. It instead proclaimed that “[u]ndoubtedly questions of statutory interpretation . . . are for the courts to resolve, giving appropriate weight to the judgment of those whose special duty is to administer the questioned statute.” Id., at 130–131. Nothing in the New Deal era or before it thus resembled the deference rule the Court would begin applying decades later to all varieties of agency interpretations of statutes under Chevron. Pp. 7–13.

  (b) Congress in 1946 enacted the APA “as a check upon administrators whose zeal might otherwise have carried them to excesses not contemplated in legislation creating their offices.” Morton Salt, 338 U. S., at 644. The APA prescribes procedures for agency action and delineates the basic contours of judicial review of such action. And it codifies for agency cases the unremarkable, yet elemental proposition reflected by judicial practice dating back to Marbury: that courts decide legal questions by applying their own judgment. As relevant here, the APA specifies that courts, not agencies, will decide “all relevant questions of law” arising on review of agency action, 5 U. S. C. §706 (emphasis added)—even those involving ambiguous laws. It prescribes no deferential standard for courts to employ in answering those legal questions, despite mandating deferential judicial review of agency policymaking and factfinding. See §§706(2)(A), (E). And by directing courts to “interpret constitutional and statutory provisions” without differentiating between the two, §706, it makes clear that agency interpretations of statutes—like agency interpretations of the Constitution—are not entitled to deference. The APA’s history and the contemporaneous views of various respected commentators underscore the plain meaning of its text.

  Courts exercising independent judgment in determining the meaning of statutory provisions, consistent with the APA, may—as they have from the start—seek aid from the interpretations of those responsible for implementing particular statutes. See Skidmore, 323 U. S., at 140. And when the best reading of a statute is that it delegates discretionary authority to an agency, the role of the reviewing court under the APA is, as always, to independently interpret the statute and effectuate the will of Congress subject to constitutional limits. The court fulfills that role by recognizing constitutional delegations, fixing the boundaries of the delegated authority, and ensuring the agency has engaged in “ ‘reasoned decisionmaking’ ” within those boundaries. Michigan v. EPA, 576 U. S. 743, 750 (quoting Allentown Mack Sales & Service, Inc. v. NLRB, 522 U. S. 359, 374). By doing so, a court upholds the traditional conception of the judicial function that the APA adopts. Pp. 13–18.

  (c) The deference that Chevron requires of courts reviewing agency action cannot be squared with the APA. Pp. 18–29.

   (1) Chevron, decided in 1984 by a bare quorum of six Justices, triggered a marked departure from the traditional judicial approach of independently examining each statute to determine its meaning. The question in the case was whether an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation was consistent with the term “stationary source” as used in the Clean Air Act. 467 U. S., at 840. To answer that question, the Court articulated and employed a now familiar two-step approach broadly applicable to review of agency action. The first step was to discern “whether Congress ha[d] directly spoken to the precise question at issue.” Id., at 842. The Court explained that “[i]f the intent of Congress is clear, that is the end of the matter,” ibid., and courts were therefore to “reject administrative constructions which are contrary to clear congressional intent,” id., at 843, n. 9. But in a case in which “the statute [was] silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue” at hand, a reviewing court could not “simply impose its own construction on the statute, as would be necessary in the absence of an administrative interpretation.” Id., at 843 (footnote omitted). Instead, at Chevron’s second step, a court had to defer to the agency if it had offered “a permissible construction of the statute,” ibid., even if not “the reading the court would have reached if the question initially had arisen in a judicial proceeding,” ibid., n. 11. Employing this new test, the Court concluded that Congress had not addressed the question at issue with the necessary “level of specificity” and that EPA’s interpretation was “entitled to deference.” Id., at 865.

  Although the Court did not at first treat Chevron as the watershed decision it was fated to become, the Court and the courts of appeals were soon routinely invoking its framework as the governing standard in cases involving statutory questions of agency authority. The Court eventually decided that Chevron rested on “a presumption that Congress, when it left ambiguity in a statute meant for implementation by an agency, understood that the ambiguity would be resolved, first and foremost, by the agency, and desired the agency (rather than the courts) to possess whatever degree of discretion the ambiguity allows.” Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N. A., 517 U. S. 735, 740–741. Pp. 18–20.

   (2) Neither Chevron nor any subsequent decision of the Court attempted to reconcile its framework with the APA. Chevron defies the command of the APA that “the reviewing court”—not the agency whose action it reviews—is to “decide all relevant questions of law” and “interpret . . . statutory provisions.” §706 (emphasis added). It requires a court to ignore, not follow, “the reading the court would have reached” had it exercised its independent judgment as required by the APA. Chevron, 467 U. S., at 843, n. 11. Chevron insists on more than the “respect” historically given to Executive Branch interpretations; it demands that courts mechanically afford binding deference to agency interpretations, including those that have been inconsistent over time, see id., at 863, and even when a pre-existing judicial precedent holds that an ambiguous statute means something else, National Cable & Telecommunications Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services, 545 U. S. 967, 982. That regime is the antithesis of the time honored approach the APA prescribes.

  Chevron cannot be reconciled with the APA by presuming that statutory ambiguities are implicit delegations to agencies. That presumption does not approximate reality. A statutory ambiguity does not necessarily reflect a congressional intent that an agency, as opposed to a court, resolve the resulting interpretive question. Many or perhaps most statutory ambiguities may be unintentional. And when courts confront statutory ambiguities in cases that do not involve agency interpretations or delegations of authority, they are not somehow relieved of their obligation to independently interpret the statutes. Instead of declaring a particular party’s reading “permissible” in such a case, courts use every tool at their disposal to determine the best reading of the statute and resolve the ambiguity. But in an agency case as in any other, there is a best reading all the same—“the reading the court would have reached” if no agency were involved. Chevron, 467 U. S., at 843, n. 11. It therefore makes no sense to speak of a “permissible” interpretation that is not the one the court, after applying all relevant interpretive tools, concludes is best.

  Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do. The Framers anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment. Chevron gravely erred in concluding that the inquiry is fundamentally different just because an administrative interpretation is in play. The very point of the traditional tools of statutory construction is to resolve statutory ambiguities. That is no less true when the ambiguity is about the scope of an agency’s own power—perhaps the occasion on which abdication in favor of the agency is least appropriate. Pp. 21–23.

   (3) The Government responds that Congress must generally intend for agencies to resolve statutory ambiguities because agencies have subject matter expertise regarding the statutes they administer; because deferring to agencies purportedly promotes the uniform construction of federal law; and because resolving statutory ambiguities can involve policymaking best left to political actors, rather than courts. See Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219, pp. 16–19. But none of these considerations justifies Chevron’s sweeping presumption of congressional intent.

  As the Court recently noted, interpretive issues arising in connection with a regulatory scheme “may fall more naturally into a judge’s bailiwick” than an agency’s. Kisor v. Wilkie, 588 U. S. 558, 578. Under Chevron’s broad rule of deference, though, ambiguities of all stripes trigger deference, even in cases having little to do with an agency’s technical subject matter expertise. And even when an ambiguity happens to implicate a technical matter, it does not follow that Congress has taken the power to authoritatively interpret the statute from the courts and given it to the agency. Congress expects courts to handle technical statutory questions, and courts did so without issue in agency cases before Chevron. After all, in an agency case in particular, the reviewing court will go about its task with the agency’s “body of experience and informed judgment,” among other information, at its disposal. Skidmore, 323 U. S., at 140. An agency’s interpretation of a statute “cannot bind a court,” but may be especially informative “to the extent it rests on factual premises within [the agency’s] expertise.” Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms v. FLRA, 464 U. S. 89, 98, n. 8. Delegating ultimate interpretive authority to agencies is simply not necessary to ensure that the resolution of statutory ambiguities is well informed by subject matter expertise.

  Nor does a desire for the uniform construction of federal law justify Chevron. It is unclear how much the Chevron doctrine as a whole actually promotes such uniformity, and in any event, we see no reason to presume that Congress prefers uniformity for uniformity’s sake over the correct interpretation of the laws it enacts.

  Finally, the view that interpretation of ambiguous statutory provisions amounts to policymaking suited for political actors rather than courts is especially mistaken because it rests on a profound misconception of the judicial role. Resolution of statutory ambiguities involves legal interpretation, and that task does not suddenly become policymaking just because a court has an “agency to fall back on.” Kisor, 588 U. S., at 575. Courts interpret statutes, no matter the context, based on the traditional tools of statutory construction, not individual policy preferences. To stay out of discretionary policymaking left to the political branches, judges need only fulfill their obligations under the APA to independently identify and respect such delegations of authority, police the outer statutory boundaries of those delegations, and ensure that agencies exercise their discretion consistent with the APA. By forcing courts to instead pretend that ambiguities are necessarily delegations, Chevron prevents judges from judging. Pp. 23–26.

   (4) Because Chevron’s justifying presumption is, as Members of the Court have often recognized, a fiction, the Court has spent the better part of four decades imposing one limitation on Chevron after another. Confronted with the byzantine set of preconditions and exceptions that has resulted, some courts have simply bypassed Chevron or failed to heed its various steps and nuances. The Court, for its part, has not deferred to an agency interpretation under Chevron since 2016. But because Chevron remains on the books, litigants must continue to wrestle with it, and lower courts—bound by even the Court’s crumbling precedents—understandably continue to apply it. At best, Chevron has been a distraction from the question that matters: Does the statute authorize the challenged agency action? And at worst, it has required courts to violate the APA by yielding to an agency the express responsibility, vested in “the reviewing court,” to “decide all relevant questions of law” and “interpret . . . statutory provisions.” §706 (emphasis added). Pp. 26–29.

  (d) Stare decisis, the doctrine governing judicial adherence to precedent, does not require the Court to persist in the Chevron project. The stare decisis considerations most relevant here—“the quality of [the precedent’s] reasoning, the workability of the rule it established, . . . and reliance on the decision,” Knick v. Township of Scott, 588 U. S. 180, 203 (quoting Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees, 585 U. S. 878, 917)—all weigh in favor of letting Chevron go.

  Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided. It reshaped judicial review of agency action without grappling with the APA, the statute that lays out how such review works. And its flaws were apparent from the start, prompting the Court to revise its foundations and continually limit its application.

  Experience has also shown that Chevron is unworkable. The defining feature of its framework is the identification of statutory ambiguity, but the concept of ambiguity has always evaded meaningful definition. Such an impressionistic and malleable concept “cannot stand as an every-day test for allocating” interpretive authority between courts and agencies. Swift & Co. v. Wickham, 382 U. S. 111, 125. The Court has also been forced to clarify the doctrine again and again, only adding to Chevron’s unworkability, and the doctrine continues to spawn difficult threshold questions that promise to further complicate the inquiry should Chevron be retained. And its continuing import is far from clear, as courts have often declined to engage with the doctrine, saying it makes no difference.

  Nor has Chevron fostered meaningful reliance. Given the Court’s constant tinkering with and eventual turn away from Chevron, it is hard to see how anyone could reasonably expect a court to rely on Chevron in any particular case or expect it to produce readily foreseeable outcomes. And rather than safeguarding reliance interests, Chevron affirmatively destroys them by allowing agencies to change course even when Congress has given them no power to do so.

  The only way to “ensure that the law will not merely change erratically, but will develop in a principled and intelligible fashion,” Vasquez v. Hillery, 474 U. S. 254, 265, is for the Court to leave Chevron behind. By overruling Chevron, though, the Court does not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful—including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself—are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite the Court’s change in interpretive methodology. See CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries, 553 U. S. 442, 457. Mere reliance on Chevron cannot constitute a “ ‘special justification’ ” for overruling such a holding. Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., 573 U. S. 258, 266 (quoting Dickerson v. United States, 530 U. S. 428, 443). Pp. 29–35.

No. 22–451, 45 F. 4th 359 & No. 22–1219, 62 F. 4th 621, vacated and remanded.

 Roberts, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., and Gorsuch, J., filed concurring opinions. Kagan, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Sotomayor, J., joined, and in which Jackson, J., joined as it applies to No. 22–1219. Jackson, J., took no part in the consideration or decision of the case in No. 22–451.

Notes
¹ *Together with No. 22–1219, Relentless, Inc., et al. v. Department of Commerce, et al., on certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 imposes criminal liability on anyone who corruptly “alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding.” 18 U. S. C. §1512(c)(1). The next subsection extends that prohibition to anyone who “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” §1512(c)(2). Petitioner Joseph Fischer was charged with violating §1512(c)(2) for his conduct on January 6, 2021. On that day, Congress convened in a joint session to certify the votes in the 2020 Presidential election. While they did so, a crowd of supporters of then-President Donald Trump gathered outside the Capitol, and some eventually forced their way into the building, breaking windows and assaulting police. App. 189. This breach of the Capitol delayed the certification of the vote. The criminal complaint alleges that Fischer was among those who invaded the building. Fischer was charged with various crimes for his actions on January 6, including obstructing an official proceeding in violation of §1512(c)(2). He moved to dismiss that charge, arguing that the provision criminalizes only attempts to impair the availability or integrity of evidence. The District Court granted his motion in relevant part. A divided panel of the D. C. Circuit reversed and remanded for further proceedings.

Held: To prove a violation of §1512(c)(2), the Government must establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or other things used in an official proceeding, or attempted to do so.

 (a) To determine the scope of the residual “otherwise” clause in §1512(c)(2), the Court must decide how it is linked to its “surrounding words,” Yates v. United States, 574 U. S. 528, 536 (plurality opinion), and “ ‘give effect, if possible, to every clause and word of [the] statute.’ ” Williams v. Taylor, 529 U. S. 362, 404 (quoting United States v. Menasche, 348 U. S. 528, 538-539). The Court considers both “the specific context” in which (c)(2) appears “and the broader context of the statute as a whole.” Robinson v. Shell Oil Co., 519 U. S. 337, 341.

  (1) Section 1512(c)(1) describes particular types of criminal conduct in specific terms. The purpose of (c)(2) is, as the parties agree, to cover some set of “matters not specifically contemplated” by (c)(1). Republic of Iraq v. Beaty, 556 U. S. 848, 860. Perhaps Congress sought to criminalize all obstructive acts in §1512(c), and having named a few examples in (c)(1), devised (c)(2) to prohibit the rest. But (c)(2) could have a narrower scope if Congress designed it to fill inadvertent gaps in the focused language of (c)(1).

 One way to discern the reach of an “otherwise” clause is to look for guidance from whatever examples come before it. Two general principles are relevant. First, the canon of noscitur a sociis teaches that a word is “given more precise content by the neighboring words with which it is associated.” United States v. Williams, 553 U. S. 285, 294. And under the related canon of ejusdem generis, a general or collective term at the end of a list of specific items is typically controlled and defined by reference to those specific items that precede it. Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon, 596 U. S. 450, 458. These approaches to statutory interpretation track the common sense intuition that Congress would not ordinarily introduce a general term that renders meaningless the specific text that accompanies it.

 Under these principles, the “otherwise” provision of §1512(c)(2) is limited by the list of specific criminal violations that precede it in (c)(1). If, as the Government asserts, (c)(2) covers all forms of obstructive conduct beyond §1512(c)(1)’s focus on evidence impairment, Congress would have had little reason to provide any specific examples at all. And the sweep of subsection (c)(2) would swallow (c)(1), leaving that narrower provision with no work to do.

 Tethering subsection (c)(2) to the context of (c)(1) recognizes the distinct purpose of each provision. Subsection (c)(1) refers to a defined set of offense conduct—four types of actions that, by their nature, impair the integrity or availability of records, documents, or objects for use in an official proceeding. Reading the “otherwise” clause as having been given more precise content by (c)(1), subsection (c)(2) makes it a crime to impair the availability or integrity of records, documents, or objects used in an official proceeding in ways other than those specified in (c)(1). For example, it is possible to violate (c)(2) by creating false evidence—rather than altering incriminating evidence. Subsection (c)(2) also ensures that liability is still imposed for impairing the availability or integrity of other things used in an official proceeding beyond the “record[s], document[s], or other object[s]” enumerated in (c)(1), such as witness testimony or intangible information.

  (2) It makes sense to read (c)(2) as limited by (c)(1) in light of the history of the provision. The Enron accounting scandal exposed a loophole in §1512. At that time, the statute imposed liability on anyone who, among other things, corruptly persuaded another person to shred documents. But it curiously failed to impose liability on a person who destroyed records himself. The parties agree that Congress enacted §1512(c) as part of the broader Sarbanes-Oxley Act to plug this loophole. It would be peculiar to conclude that in closing the Enron gap, Congress created a catch-all provision that reaches beyond the scenarios that prompted the legislation.

 (b) The broader context of §1512 in the criminal code confirms that (c)(2) is limited by the scope of (c)(1). Federal obstruction law consists of numerous provisions that target specific criminal acts and settings, much of which would be unnecessary if (c)(2) criminalized essentially all obstructive conduct. Given the Court’s obligation to give meaning where possible to each word and provision in the Code, Taylor, 529 U. S., at 404, the Court’s narrower interpretation of subsection (c)(2) is the superior one.

 An unbounded interpretation of subsection (c)(2) would also render superfluous the careful delineation of different types of obstructive conduct in §1512 itself. That section provides a reticulated list of nearly two dozen means of committing obstruction with penalties ranging from three years to life in prison, or even death. The Government’s reading would lump together under (c)(2) disparate types of conduct for which Congress had assigned proportionate sentences.

 (c) The Government’s theory would also criminalize a broad swath of prosaic conduct, exposing activists and lobbyist to decades in prison. Our usual approach in obstruction cases has been to “resist reading” particular sub-provisions “to create a coverall statute.” Yates, 574 U. S., at 549 (plurality opinion). Nothing in the text or statutory history gives the Court a reason to depart from that practice today. And the Government’s interpretation would give prosecutors broad discretion to seek a 20-year maximum sentence for acts Congress saw fit to punish with far shorter sentences. By reading (c)(2) in light of (c)(1), the Court affords proper respect to “the prerogatives of Congress” in carrying out the quintessentially legislative act of defining crimes and setting the penalties for them. United States v. Aguilar, 515 U. S. 593, 600.

64 F. 4th 329, vacated and remanded.

 Roberts, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Jackson, JJ., joined. Jackson, J., filed a concurring opinion. Barrett, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Sotomayor and Kagan, JJ., joined.