WASHINGTON—A lawyer for a Marine Corps veteran said to have been arbitrarily denied medical benefits urged the Supreme Court to overturn a bureaucracy-empowering legal doctrine that allowed the executive agency to refuse those benefits.
If the court agrees with James Kisor, who seeks disability benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder arising out of his participation in Operation Harvest Moon, a bloody combat battle in Vietnam in December 1965, the stage could be set for invalidating the 35-year-old so-called Chevron doctrine, under which courts defer to agency interpretations of the statutes they enforce.
