Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Tuesday that plaintiffs bringing class actions cannot escape federal jurisdiction by stipulating to seek less than $5 million in damages.  In a nine-page opinion, the Court held that plaintiff Greg Knowles had no power to speak for the proposed class when he…

Continue Reading Supreme Court Rejects Plaintiffs’ Efforts to Stipulate Out of Federal Court

This week, in a 5-4 decision in Clapper et al. v. Amnesty International USA et al., the United States Supreme Court rejected two theories of Article III standing presented by a group of attorneys, human rights, labor, legal, and media organizations who sought a declaration that surveillance under section 1881a of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) is unconstitutional as well as an injunction against section 1881a-authorized surveillance.

These respondents argued first that, because their work requires them to engage in sensitive and/or privileged communications with individuals located abroad who are likely targets of surveillance, there was an objectively reasonable likelihood that their communications would be acquired under section 1881a at some point in the future, thus causing them injury.  (Section 1881a, which was added by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, authorizes, under certain circumstances, the government surveillance of individuals who are not “United States persons” and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States).  Second, the respondents maintained that the risk of surveillance under section 1881a is so substantial that they had been forced to take costly and burdensome measures to protect the confidentiality of their communications that constitute present injury and are fairly traceable to section 1881a.

The Supreme Court rejected each of these arguments holding (1) that respondents’ “highly attenuated chain of possibilities” and theory of future injury was too speculative to satisfy the well-established Article III standing requirement that threatened injury be “certainly impending” and, moreover, that they could not establish that the injury was fairly traceable to section 1881a; and (2) that the respondents “cannot manufacture standing by choosing to make expenditures based on hypothetical future harm that is not certainly impending.”Continue Reading Supreme Court Nixes FISA Surveillance Suit on Standing Grounds

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the federal government does not always lose its sovereign immunity to damages lawsuits claiming that an agency violated the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (“FACTA”) by printing the expiration date of a credit card on a receipt issued to a consumer. In a unanimous decision, authored by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court rejected a November 2010 ruling by the Federal Circuit that the Little Tucker Act authorized the government to be sued for money damages under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”), which FACTA amended.  

James Bormes, a Chicago lawyer, paid a $350 court filing fee through the federal government’s pay.gov system with his American Express card. He was sent an electronic receipt for the transaction, which contained his credit card’s expiration date. Bormes alleged that this violated FACTA’s prohibition on printing expiration dates on credit card receipts issued at the point of sale.  He sued the government, seeking class-action status on behalf of thousands of people issued receipts that displayed card expiration dates or more than the last five digits of credit and debit card numbers (which FACTA also prohibits).

The district court initially dismissed the suit, finding that the FCRA does not contain an explicit waiver of the government’s sovereign immunity and could, therefore, not allow for the plaintiff’s damages claims. Bormes appealed to the Federal Circuit, which has exclusive jurisdiction for appeals in which a lower court’s jurisdiction was based partly on the Little Tucker Act. The government moved to transfer the suit to the Seventh Circuit, arguing that the Act’s jurisdictional provision did not apply. The Federal Circuit denied the motion and vacated the lower court’s ruling. The federal government then took the sovereign immunity issue to the Supreme Court.Continue Reading Government May be Immune to Suits Alleging Violations of FACTA

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision that put an end to a proposed class action lawsuit stemming from a data breach.  The suit, Reilly v. Ceridian Corp., was brought by two individuals who were among approximately 27,000 employees at…

Continue Reading Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Class Action Suit Stemming From Data Breach

The federal government conducted a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment when it attached a GPS tracking device to a suspect’s car and used the device to track the suspect’s movements for 28 days, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday.

All nine justices voted to uphold the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversing Antoine Jones’s drug-trafficking conviction, which was partly based on evidence obtained from the tracking device. But the Court split 5-4 on how the government’s actions constituted a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

A five-justice majority, in an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, held that the government’s physical attachment of the device to Jones’s car was the critical factor because the Fourth Amendment specifically protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”  Physically trespassing on one of Jones’s “effects” — the car — in order to obtain information would have been considered a search when the Fourth Amendment was adopted, the Court held, and such an intrusion therefore requires the government to obtain a warrant under most circumstances. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor joined Justice Scalia’s majority opinion.Continue Reading Supreme Court: Attaching GPS Tracker to Suspect’s Car Constitutes Search For Purposes of Fourth Amendment

On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court unanimously held that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) allows private citizens to seek relief in federal (in addition to state) court.  Overturning an Eleventh Circuit decision that Congress had vested jurisdiction over private TCPA actions exclusively in state courts and disagreeing with…

Continue Reading Supreme Court Holds That Private Plaintiffs May Bring TCPA Claims In Federal Court

On January 10, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in CompuCredit Corp. et al. v. Wanda Greenwood et al. that the Credit Repair Organizations Act (“CROA”) does not override arbitration clauses in agreements between consumers and credit repair organizations.  The CROA prohibits credit repair organizations (i.e., companies that…

Continue Reading U.S. Supreme Court Rules CROA Does Not Override Arbitration Clauses

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Federal Aviation Administration v. Cooper, a case that raises the question of whether a plaintiff who alleges only mental and emotional distress can establish “actual damages” within the meaning of the federal Privacy Act’s civil remedies provision.  The question is crucial to determining the scope of relief afforded under one of the principal legal restraints on the federal government’s use and disclosure of the “records” it maintains about individuals.Continue Reading Supreme Court Considers Key Question Under the Privacy Act