Supreme Court Update: A Tale of Three Statutes
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The Supreme Court released three opinions Monday that would be of interest to civil practitioners:
- American Needle, Inc. v. National Football League (pdf), holding that the NFL and its teams were separate enough to be capable of creating a combination in restraint of trade by the formation of a single entity to exclusively license NFL gear (Stephens, J.).
- Lewis v. City of Chicago (pdf), holding that a plaintiff can bring a disparate impact claim under Title VII when the practice is applied, even if the practice was adopted outside the otherwise applicable limitations period (Scalia, J.).
- Hardt v. Reliance Standard Life Insurance Company (pdf), holding that ERISA allows an award of attorneys fees, even if the party seeking them was not a prevailing party; rather, they need only be a mostly prevailing party (Thomas, J.).
The three cases are a tale of three different federal statutes, to which the Court (of necessity) had to apply three entirely different methods of statutory construction.
Hardt (pdf) involved ERISA, a detailed statute from the early 1970s to which Justice Thomas gave a familiar, modern and literalistic construction to Congress' language:
Whether § 1132(g) limits the availability of attorney’s fees to a “prevailing party” is a question of statutory construction. As in all such cases, we begin by analyzing the statutory language, “assum[ing] that the ordinary meaning of that language accurately expresses the legislative purpose.” . . . We must enforce plain and unambiguous statutory language according to its terms. . . .
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The words “prevailing party” do not appear in this provision. Nor does anything else in §1132(g)(1)’s text purport to limit the availability of attorney’s fees to a “prevailing party.” Instead, §1132(g)(1) expressly grants district courts “discretion” to award attorney’s fees “to either party."
In contrast, American Needle (pdf) involved the Sherman Act, dating from the dawn of time, containing language so broad that Justice Stevens rightly acknowledged that it could not be construed literally in light of the problems that would follow:
Taken literally, the applicability of §1 to “every contract, combination . . . or conspiracy” could be understood to cover every conceivable agreement, whether it be a group of competing firms fixing prices or a single firm’s chief executive telling her subordinate how to price their company’s product. But even though, “read literally,” §1 would address “the entire body of private contract,” that is not what the statute means.
Finally, Lewis (pdf) involved Title VII. While Justice Scalia acknowledged that application of Congress' language created "practical problems" and "puzzling results," he stated that it was not the job of the courts to worry about such things:
[I]t is not our task to assess the consequences of each approach and adopt the one that produces the least mischief. Our charge is to give effect to the law Congress enacted. By enacting §2000e–2(k)(1)(A)(i), Congress allowed claims to be brought against an employer who uses a practice that causes disparate impact, whatever the employer’s motives and whether or not he has employed the same practice in the past. If that effect was unintended, it is a problem for Congress, not one that federal courts can fix.
Three statutes and three completely different approaches to statutory construction--all on the same day.
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