Legal Docket: Four cases before the Supreme Court

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 15th day of April, 2024. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

Today, we’ll tackle four oral arguments. But before we get to those. we’ll tell you about three opinions the court handed down on Friday. each one unanimous!

First, a big win for private property owners facing huge permit fees before building on their own property.

This case involved a man named George Sheetz. He’d planned to build a little house on his rural property in California. But the county required first that he pay more than $23,000 for a “traffic impact fee,” even though the county didn’t base the figure on costs specifically attributable to his project.

He paid the fee, but did so under protest. And then he sued.

REICHARD: He said the government’s fee was so high, it was effectively taking his property from him—and that violates the 5th Amendment takings clause. That bill-of-rights protection bars government from taking private property for public use … without paying just compensation.

His lawyer Paul Beard had the winning argument back in January:

PAUL BEARD: Such review is needed to ensure that the government is not committing a taking in the guise of the police power to mitigate for land use impacts … upholding the lower court's decision would just invite the government to monetize across the country all of their permit exactions and to preset legislative fees in order to escape heightened review.

REICHARD: The main takeaway is the Constitution doesn’t limit the Takings Clause to a particular branch of government. Legislative or executive, federal or local, same thing.

The case is now remanded to lower court to figure out a fairer fee structure.

EICHER: On to the second opinion on arbitration.

It’s a win for local distributors of baked goods. These are businesses that sell and deliver fresh-baked goods to grocery stores, retailers, restaurants, and so forth. Distributors contract to do that and use arbitration agreements with bakeries to resolve disputes outside court.

Sure enough, a wage dispute arose and a distributor went to court.

The bakery pointed to the arbitration agreement.

But the distributor pointed to a provision of federal law. Under the Federal Arbitration Act, certain transportation workers have an exemption. The distributors said that covers their workers.

The high court agreed, again unanimously. The case is remanded to work out the wage dispute in court.

REICHARD: This last opinion today deals with securities-fraud claims.

Here, investors complained about a company that didn’t disclose that a future environmental law would hurt the company.

But the high court says silence alone is not enough. Failure to disclose certain information about future risk doesn’t by itself create a claim for securities fraud. Some affirmative statement is needed that would make the company’s silence misleading.

Case remanded for further proceedings.

EICHER: Well, alright, on to the oral arguments, four of them.

The first could be relevant to a lot of people, because it concerns mortgage loans and escrow accounts.

A man named Alex Cantero in Queens Village, New York, took out a mortgage loan from Bank of America to buy a house. The contract he signed spelled out a requirement that he put money in escrow to cover property taxes and insurance premiums.

State law requires the mortgage lender to pay at least two percent interest on escrow accounts, but Bank of America didn’t do that.

So Cantero sued for breach of contract.

REICHARD: But Bank of America says federal law doesn’t require it to pay interest. So that supercedes state law.

The bank also points to case law that says if the state law “significantly interferes” with the exercise of power by the national banks, the state law must fail.

Therefore the bank says it should win.

At the Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson homed in on that point to Cantero’s lawyer:

JUSTICE JACKSON: So I see the -- the standard, "significantly interferes," in the actual text of the statute, and I'm trying to understand whether this really is sort of an unusual or unworkable assignment for the courts.

Unworkable, and also how to quantify it. Justice Brett Kavanaugh:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: I think you said it’s a judgment call and a matter of degree. Would a 10 percent state law, would that be significant interference?

The justices wrestled with the meaning of that phrase “significant interference.” But some worried that 50 different state laws would be unmanageable for national banks.

EICHER: Case two is a question of criminal procedure.

In 2013, a jury convicted Louis McIntosh on robbery and gun offenses, and imposed a sentence of nearly 60 years in prison.

It was at the sentencing hearing that the government for the first time demanded that McIntosh forfeit some things. Namely, $75,000 in cash and a luxury car used in the robberies.

REICHARD: The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure say orders to forfeit property have to come before sentencing.

But the problem is the government missed the deadline to seek those forfeitures. So the legal question is that time limit strict, or isn’t it?

During oral argument back in February McIntosh’s lawyer Steven Yurowitz argued the time limit should be seen as strict:

STEVEN YUROWITZ: It’s not too much to ask the government, if they’re seeking to deprive someone of property, to dot their ‘i’s,’ cross their ‘t’s,’ raise this issue before sentencing, and have the court address it.

But several justices seemed to think the time limit wasn’t mandatory, and that McIntosh had enough notice about the forfeiture demand that he could have objected to it.

Different appeals courts have ruled differently on this very question … so it’s up to the Supreme Court to resolve it for everyone.

EICHER: On to the third dispute, this one about how to pay for health care for Native Americans.

Tribes manage their own healthcare programs that are federally funded by the Indian Health Service, IHS.

But the funding level is insufficient to cover the administrative costs on top of healthcare.

REICHARD: Two tribes sued the federal government to pay the overhead. The question for the court is how to divvy up limited money.

The justices expressed frustration with the way Congress wrote the various funding laws. And they expressed concern that some money would end up going to non-Indians.

But Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed out the elephant in the room. Listen to this exchange with Adam Unikowsky, lawyer for the tribes.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: There’s not so much money here that the tribes are spending this on frolics and detours, right? I mean…

UNIKOWSKY: That’s correct, Your Honor. There’s not even close to enough money.

GORSUCH: And there’s not even enough money to provide healthcare to the Indians on the reservations, and you’re operating out of decrepit old buildings in many cases. And that’s what we’re really talking about. Nor are Indian Healthcare Services providing massive benefits to non-Indians all across America. We’re talking about a reservation in central Wyoming with an incredibly poor population of Native Americans.

Every term there are at least a few cases involving the government’s treaty obligations to Native Americans, and 248 years after our founding, we’ve still not resolved all of them.

EICHER: Case four now, another frequent flier at the high court: a dispute over the scarce water resources of the Rio Grande.

The river starts in southern Colorado at the base of the San Juan Mountains. It flows south to New Mexico, then into Texas where it defines the border between Mexico and the US. The Rio Grande flows all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

REICHARD: A compact divvies up the water among Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. It says Colorado must deliver a certain amount of water to New Mexico, which in turn must deliver it to a reservoir for distribution between New Mexico and Texas.

EICHER: But Texas complains that New Mexico allows surface water to divert from the river and it also pumps groundwater out that it shouldn’t.

New Mexico says so what? There’s no agreement to deliver a specific amount of water.

REICHARD: But the federal government says it’s not that simple. It has obligations to Native American tribes as well as to Mexico, with which the U-S has a treaty obligation to deliver water.

Back in 2018—in this same fight—the high court let the federal government intervene in the case.

Thereafter, the states came to an agreement, but the federal government says they can’t do that without federal approval. To allow it would be chaos.

EICHER: Justice Clarence Thomas seemed skeptical of that claim. He’s addressing assistant to the solicitor general Frederick Liu:

JUSTICE THOMAS: I don’t remember that argument you’re making now, a sort of apocalyptic argument being made in 2018.

LIU: …I don’t think what I presented here is apocalyptic...

REICHARD: Apocalypse or no, the legal question for the justices to resolve is this: May the three states come up with a new apportionment without federal approval?

Hard to say which way this’ll go.

EICHER: OK, last case today and this is about ACCA, the Armed Career Criminal Act, another frequent flier at the court.

Federal law says a person with a felony conviction may not possess a firearm or ammunition.

REICHARD: Upon a fourth conviction, ACCA comes into play by adding more prison time— for that offense alone of possessing a gun or ammo.

The catch is those prior offenses must be committed on “different occasions.”

EICHER: Two years ago, the Supreme Court resolved how to figure out the difference between a single occasion crime like a burglary spree and different occasions of crime, say on different nights.

But that opinion didn’t say who determines that at trial: the judge, or the jury?

REICHARD: Here, Paul Erlinger argues the four burglaries he was convicted of were not separate events. Therefore, ACCA ought not have been triggered later on when he was caught with a gun.

Erlinger says a jury should have decided that point, not the trial judge.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh grappled with established law and history:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: The text itself of the Constitution does not tell us the answer, just the bare words, correct? So then we usually look to history. We might not like it, but unless we’re just making it up, I don’t know where else we’re going to look.

Each side claimed history is on its side, so the justices are left to determine who’s right.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.