Justice Dept. Revokes 25 Legal Guidance Documents Dating to 1975

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WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday that he had revoked more than two dozen documents that interpreted and explained a wide range of federal laws, including guidelines on storing explosives and accommodating people with disabilities.

The 25 rescinded documents cover more than 200 pages and date back as far as 1975. They include a Reagan-era “industry circular” by what is now known as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives saying it was illegal to ship certain guns to buyers across state lines, and an Obama-era letter urging state and local judges not to impose fines and fees in a way that locks poor people into cycles of debt and prison.

Mr. Sessions said the documents improperly went beyond explaining existing laws, and instead essentially created new rules — circumventing the regular process for creating regulations, which can include public hearings and comment periods.

“Congress has provided for a regulatory process in statute, and we are going to follow it,” he said in a statement. “This is good government and prevents confusing the public with improper and wrong advice. Therefore, any guidance that is outdated, used to circumvent the regulatory process or that improperly goes beyond what is provided for in statutes or regulation should not be given effect.”

Mr. Sessions had foreshadowed the move last month in an address delivered to the annual convention of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal network.

He also issued a memo last month barring the department from using the so-called guidance letters to create de facto regulations.

“This practice is over,” Mr. Sessions told the society. “We have prohibited all Department of Justice components from issuing any guidance that purports to impose new obligations on any party outside the executive branch. We will review and repeal existing guidance documents that violate this common sense principle.”

While guidance letters describing the department’s interpretation of the Constitution and federal laws do not technically have legal force by themselves, they carry an implicit threat that parties that do not follow their recommendations might face federal lawsuits or a loss of federal aid.

The Trump administration had already revoked the most high-profile guidance document issued by the Obama administration, a letter jointly issued by the Departments of Justice and Education in May 2016 that urged local school districts to allow transgender students to use the restrooms that corresponded with their gender identities. The Trump administration rejected that view in February.

Last month, Mr. Sessions tapped Rachel L. Brand, the No. 3 official at the department, to lead a regulatory reform task force to identify “existing guidance documents that go too far,” as she put it in a statement at the time.

One letter affected by the decision had been issued by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in October 2016. It advised public programs for employing people with developmental disabilities to modify their policies and practices, where reasonable, to better integrate their beneficiaries into mainstream workplaces in order to comply with a 1999 Supreme Court ruling about the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“The civil rights of persons with disabilities, including individuals with mental illness, intellectual or developmental disabilities, or physical disabilities, are violated by unnecessary segregation in a wide variety of settings, including in segregated employment, vocational and day programs,” the letter said.

Another letter was issued in March 2016. It was addressed to chief judges and court administrators in states, and urged them to abandon policies that could trap poor people in cycles of fines, debt and prison.

Suggesting that such policies were unconstitutional and illegal, it said arrest warrants should not be used as a way to collect fees, that courts were obligated to consider whether defendants were able to pay their fines and that judges should not use driver’s license suspensions as a punishment for missed payments.

The letter echoed the conclusions of the department’s investigation into the police and courts in Ferguson, Mo., which portrayed the legal system there as a moneymaking venture preying on poor and minority residents.

Vanita Gupta, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who served as the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the Obama administration and issued the fines and fees letter, said it came about because states and cities around the country wanted guidance after the department’s Ferguson report about what federal civil rights and constitutional law required.

She maintained it did not articulate any new principles, but simply explained and clarified existing law, citing a landmark 1983 Supreme Court ruling that held that local governments cannot imprison people for failing to pay fines they could not afford.

“The retraction of this guidance doesn’t change the existing legal framework,” Ms. Gupta said. “He can retract the guidance, but he can’t change what the law says.”