Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council (Supreme Court Decision)

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    Supreme Court Extends Time Frame for Challenges to Regulations

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    The ruling could amplify the impact of a separate decision overturning the Chevron doctrine, which had required courts to defer to executive agencies’ interpretations of statutes.The Supreme Court on Monday gave companies more time to challenge many regulations, ruling that a six-year statute of limitations for filing lawsuits begins to run when a regulation first affects a company rather than when it is first issued.The case was one of several this term challenging the power of executive agencies, and the ruling could amplify the effect of a blockbuster decision last week overturning a foundational doctrine known as Chevron deference.The vote was 6 to 3, along ideological lines.In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision, along with the case on Chevron, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, was part of an assault on the power of administrative agencies.“At the end of a momentous term,” she wrote, “this much is clear: The tsunami of lawsuits against agencies that the court’s holdings in this case and Loper Bright have authorized has the potential to devastate the functioning of the federal government.”The case on time limits, Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, No. 22-1008, arose from a challenge to a 2011 regulation of debit-card swipe fees brought by two trade associations in 2021. After the government moved to dismiss the case on statute of limitations grounds, the associations added a third plaintiff: Corner Post, a truck stop and convenience store in Watford City, N.D., that had opened for business in 2018.The amended suit said Corner Post could not have sued within the six-year period after the issuance of the regulation because it did not yet exist. It said the six-year clock should have started running when the regulation first affected the company.Lower courts disagreed, dismissing the case.When the case was argued in February, Justice Elena Kagan asked a government lawyer how important a decision extending the statute of limitations would be if the court overruled a seminal administrative-law decision, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The decision established the Chevron doctrine, which required federal courts to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes.“Has the Justice Department and the agencies considered whether there is any interaction between these two challenges?” Justice Kagan asked.The lawyer, Benjamin W. Snyder, responded, “I want to be careful here.”Then he added that the consequences could be enormous. “I think what I’d say is that a decision for petitioner here would magnify the effect of any other decisions changing the way that this court or other courts have approached administrative law questions,” he said, “because it would potentially mean that those changes would then be applied retroactively to every regulation that an agency has adopted in the last, I don’t know, 75 years or something.”In a Supreme Court brief, the government wrote that the challengers’ approach “would allow a far broader set of potential plaintiffs to pursue belated challenges to agency regulations.” More

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      Supreme Court Rejects S.E.C.’s Administrative Tribunals

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      Such tribunals, common in executive agencies, hear enforcement actions without juries, a practice that challengers said violated the Constitution.The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected one of the primary ways the Securities and Exchange Commission enforces laws against securities fraud.The agency, like other regulators, brings some enforcement actions in internal tribunals rather than in federal courts. The S.E.C.’s practice, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a six-justice majority in a decision divided along ideological lines, violated the right to a jury trial.“A defendant facing a fraud suit has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers before a neutral adjudicator,” the chief justice wrote.The case is one of several challenges this term to the power of administrative agencies, long a target of the conservative legal movement. The court last month rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of the way the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded. In January, it heard arguments in a pair of challenges to the Chevron doctrine, a foundational principle of administrative law that requires judicial deference to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. (That case has not been decided.)A central question in the new case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, No. 22-859, was whether the administrative tribunals violate the right to a jury trial guaranteed by the Seventh Amendment in “suits at common law.”Lawyers for the agency said juries were not required in administrative proceedings because they were not private lawsuits but part of an effort to protect the rights of the public generally. They added that agency adjudications without juries are commonplace, with two dozen agencies having the authority to impose penalties in administrative proceedings.The case concerned George Jarkesy, a hedge fund manager accused of misleading investors. The S.E.C. brought a civil enforcement proceeding against him before an administrative law judge employed by the agency, who ruled against Mr. Jarkesy. After an internal appeal, the agency eventually ordered him and his company to pay a civil penalty of $300,000 and to disgorge $685,000 in what it said were illicit gains.Mr. Jarkesy appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans. A divided three-judge panel of that court ruled against the agency on three different grounds, all with the potential to disrupt enforcement of not only the securities laws but also many other kinds of regulations.In addition to saying that the tribunals ran afoul of the right to a jury trial, the appeals court ruled that the agency’s judges were excessively insulated from presidential oversight and that Congress could not allow the agency itself to decide where suits should be filed. More

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      Supreme Court Backs Starbucks Over ‘Memphis 7’ Union Case

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      In a blow to the National Labor Relations Board, the justices cited inconsistent standards for courts to order employers to reinstate fired workers.The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Starbucks on Thursday in a challenge against a labor ruling by a federal judge, making it more difficult for a key federal agency to intervene when a company is accused of illegally suppressing labor organizing.Eight justices backed the majority opinion, which was written by Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a separate opinion concurring with parts of the majority opinion, dissenting from other portions and agreeing with the overall judgment.The ruling came in a case brought by Starbucks over the firing of seven workers in Memphis who were trying to unionize a store in 2022. The company said it had fired them for allowing a television crew into a closed store, while the workers said that they were fired for their unionization efforts and that the company didn’t typically enforce the rules they were accused of violating.After the firings, the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint saying that Starbucks had acted because the workers had “joined or assisted the union and engaged in concerted activities, and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities.” Separately, lawyers for the board asked a federal judge in Tennessee for an injunction reinstating the workers, and the judge issued the order in August 2022.The agency asks judges to reinstate workers in such cases because resolving the underlying legal issues can take years, during which time other workers may become discouraged from organizing even if the fired workers ultimately prevail.In its petition to the Supreme Court, the company argued that federal courts had differing standards when deciding whether to grant injunctions that reinstate workers, which the N.L.R.B. has the authority to seek under the National Labor Relations Act.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More