The Ohio Supreme Court ruled on Oct. 16, 2025, that state courts should not defer to the Ohio Industrial Commission’s interpretations of Ohio’s safety laws or administrative rules when reviewing whether an employer violated them. The ruling in State ex rel. Berry v. Indus. Commission came after a worker appealed a commission ruling that he was not entitled to a Violation of Specific Safety Requirement (VSSR) award.

What’s the background?
Administrative law judges in the Ohio Industrial Commission hear appeals of Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation (BWC) decisions. The Commission has exclusive and final jurisdiction to determine whether an injury, disease, or death resulted from an employer’s failure to comply with any specific safety requirement. Ohio employees may be entitled to VSSR awards when a workplace injury results from an employer’s violation of a safety requirement.

Curtis Berry applied for a VSSR award under Article II, Section 35 of the Ohio Constitution in 2019 following a 2017 work injury, saying that his employer, Underground Utilities Inc., violated three safety regulations.

The Commission denied the VSSR award application in 2021, ruling that either Underground Utilities Inc. did not violate the regulations or that the allegedly violated regulations did not apply. Berry filed a complaint against the commission’s decision in the Ohio Tenth District Court of Appeals, arguing that the Commission misinterpreted the regulations and that Underground Utilities Inc. had violated them.

The Ohio Tenth District Court of Appeals found that courts should not defer to the Commission’s interpretation of safety statutes or regulations. The court vacated the Commission’s decision, and ordered the Commission to issue Berry an award. Both Underground Utilities Inc. and the Commission appealed the decision to the Ohio Supreme Court.

On Oct. 16, the state supreme court upheld the Tenth District’s ruling that while the commission’s factual determinations are final, its legal interpretations of specific safety requirements are not, and that courts must rely on their own interpretations of state safety laws and regulations. However, it ruled that the Tenth District overstepped its legal authority by requiring the Commission to issue Berry a VSSR award, saying it impeded the Commission’s statutory jurisdiction to decide whether a violation occurred and caused an injury. The court ordered the Commission to rehear the case in light of the Tenth District’s interpretation of the regulations the employer allegedly violated.

The decision was unanimous; the court has seven Republican justices and one Democratic justice.

Zooming out
The Ohio Supreme Court has already limited judicial deference to agencies through two recent decisions. In 2022, it ruled that courts are not required to defer to agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous statutes, though they may consider them as persuasive. The practice of deferring to agencies’ interpretations of statutes is known as Chevron deference, which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned at the federal level through its 2024 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. In 2023, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that state courts must not defer to agency interpretations of their own regulations, a practice called Auer deference.

The decision in State ex rel. Berry v. Indus. Commission applies to the Industrial Commission’s interpretations of state safety requirements, which come from both state law and state regulations. The State ex rel. Berry ruling expanded the 2022 decision not to require Chevron deference by saying courts must not defer to such interpretations by the Industrial Commission. The Oct. 16 ruling also differed from the 2023 limitation of Auer deference. Since the commission does not promulgate safety regulations, deference to interpretations of these regulations would go beyond Auer deference and include rules that other agencies created.

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