When is it too late to blow the whistle on fraud?

The Supreme Court is considering a case that touches on one of the government’s longstanding fraud-fighting tools to encourage people in-the-know to report fraud against the government.

Benjamin Carter did just that. He worked for an engineering company in Iraq under contract with the U.S. military. His job was water purification.

But Carter said the company cheated the U.S. government by falsifying time sheets for work the company wasn’t actually doing. He sued under the False Claims Act as a whistleblower and stands to win lots of money if he prevails.

Congress passed the law in 1863 to address rampant fraud during the Civil War, when unscrupulous vendors sold sick horses or rotten food to the Union Army. Today, whistleblowers like Carter can come forward and then share in any money recovered from those who profit by lying and cheating during wartime.

But Carter’s former employer, Kellogg, Brown & Root, argues Carter’s case comes too late. The six-year statute of limitations to sue under the False Claims Act has passed. Besides, that same law provides for only one claim per each set of facts, and another party filed suit based on similar information.

But after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Department of Justice pleaded it needed more time than given by law to prosecute cheaters. Government resources were focused tightly on winning World War II, leaving little time for legal wars. So Congress passed a law that said during times of war, the government could have more time to bring such cases.

The Department of Justice started using this extra time to pursue fraudsters more recently during the Iraq and Afghanistan hostilities, wars that have not taken all of the government’s focus as WWII did.

Lawyers for Kellogg, Brown & Root also argued the court cannot allow more than one whistleblower case to come forward. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought it unfair to treat all whistleblower complaints the same: “So you have somebody who is the first filer and comes in with a sloppy complaint and it’s not stated with sufficient specificity; dismissed. And that person goes way. You’re saying nobody else can ever come in.” The justices seemed to lean in favor of the whistleblower on that matter. After all, it would defeat the purpose of the False Claims Act if an earlier case that wasn’t decided on the merits was dismissed, and that outcome had the additional effect of barring all subsequent whistleblower claims.

It’s a crucial case, and however it’s decided will have implications beyond the Iraq War.

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Student takes on affirmative action again

The white student who challenged the University of Texas for discriminating against her on the basis of race has refiled the case with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Two years ago, the high court heard Abigail Fisher’s case and sent it back to the lower court to evaluate it according to a stricter formula, allowing race as just one of several factors to consider.

The lower court used the new formula but still found the university’s policy was not discriminatory. Fisher disagrees.

The high court has pending challenges to affirmative-action plans at two other universities, increasing the chance it will agree to hear the issue yet again.

The justices’ revisiting issues they’ve already recently considered—from affirmative action to same-sex marriage and Obamacare to voting rights—is becoming a pattern in this term.