Carr v. Saul

In this episode, Mark discusses NCLA’s amicus win at SCOTUS in Carr v. Saul. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that the lower courts erred in imposing an issue-exhaustion requirement on Social Security disability claimants. In Carr v. Saul, claimants challenged a judge-made version of the administrative exhaustion rule, a requirement that litigants at an administrative hearing must raise any legal arguments in support of their claim at each step of the administrative process or forfeit those arguments on appeal. NCLA and the Cato Institute filed a joint amicus brief arguing that imposing issue exhaustion requirements is inappropriate when the issue does not depend on an agency’s discretion, expertise, or fact-finding.

In Justice Sotomayor’s opinion for the Court, the judgments of the Eighth and Tenth Circuit Courts of Appeal were reversed under the reasoning that petitioners could not have developed their Appointments Clause challenges in the Social Security Administration (SSA) administrative law judge (ALJ) proceedings given that: (1) the proceedings were non-adversarial; and (2)(a) the structural constitutional claims at issue were ill suited for agency adjudication because they fell outside the agency’s expertise; and (b) raising them would have been futile since the SSA ALJ could not have granted the claimants their requested relief.

NCLA’s amicus briefs in Lucia v. SEC and now Carr aim to ensure that agency adjudicators must afford people their constitutionally guaranteed rights. The Court’s decision in Carr makes certain that Article III courts will serve as a constitutional backstop and step in to enforce the Constitution when agencies can’t or won’t.

Read more about the decision here: https://nclalegal.org/2021/04/in-victory-for-ncla-supreme-court-unanimously-rejects-issue-exhaustion-requirement-before-alj/

AMG v. FTC

Later in the episode, Vec talks about NCLA’s second SCOTUS victory of the week in AMG Capital Management, LLC, et al. v. Federal Trade Commission. Justice Stephen Breyer handed down a unanimous decision declaring that section 13(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act does not authorize the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) “to seek, or a court to award, equitable monetary relief such as restitution or disgorgement.”

Section 13(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act strictly authorizes the Commission to obtain, “in proper cases,” a “permanent injunction” in federal court against “any person, partnership, or corporation” that it believes “is violating, or is about to violate, any provision of law” that the Commission enforces. But the FTC had transformed its limited statutory right to enjoin present or future unlawful conduct into a near-absolute right to secure any “equitable remedy” for past damages under Section 13(b). NCLA’s successful amicus brief admonished FTC for its unlawful practice of applying the agency’s statutory provisions in an unauthorized way to avoid the due process protections for monetary remedies Congress provided in the FTC Act.

NCLA commends the Court for rejecting the FTC’s arguments and for restoring the limits Congress imposed on the agency.

Read more about the decision here: https://nclalegal.org/2021/04/ncla-celebrates-scotus-win-rejecting-ftc-power-grab-and-restoring-limits-on-rogue-agency/

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