Supreme Court extends time to challenge many regulations

The Supreme Court on Monday granted companies more time to challenge many laws, ruling that the six-year statute of limitations for claims begins to run when the laws first affect a company, not when they are issued.

The case is one of several this term challenging the authority of executive agencies, and the ruling could compound the fallout from last week’s landmark decision that struck down a core doctrine known as the Chevron compliance rule.

The vote ended 6-3, along ideological lines.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision, like Chevron’s Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, was part of an attack on the authority of administrative agencies.

“At the end of his momentous term,” she wrote, “one thing is clear: the tsunami of agency lawsuits authorized by the court’s rulings in this case and by Loper Bright has the potential to destroy the functioning of the federal government.”

The statute of limitations case, Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, No. 22-1008, arose out of a complaint challenging a 2011 debit card swipe fee regulation filed by two industry associations in 2021. After the government moved to dismiss the case on statute of limitations grounds, the industry associations added a third plaintiff: Corner Post, a gas station and convenience store in Watford City, North Dakota, that began operating in 2018.

The amended complaint said Corner Post could not sue within six years of the ordinance because it did not yet exist. It said the six-year clock should have started when the ordinance first affected the company.

The lower courts disagreed with this position and dismissed the case.

When the case was argued in February, Justice Elena Kagan asked a government lawyer how significant the ruling to extend the statute of limitations would be if the court overturned a landmark administrative law decision, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. That decision established the Chevron doctrine, which required federal courts to defer to agencies’ rational interpretations of ambiguous statutes.

“Has the Department of Justice and the agencies considered whether there is any interaction between the two challenges?” Kagan asked.

Attorney Benjamin W. Snyder responded: “I want to be careful here.”

He went on to say that the ramifications could be enormous. “I think I would say that a decision in favor of the petitioner here would amplify the effect of any other decisions that change the way this court or other courts approach administrative law issues,” he said, “because it would potentially mean that those changes would be applied retroactively to every regulation that the agency has adopted in the last, I don’t know, 75 years or something.”

In the Supreme Court’s brief, the government wrote that the plaintiffs’ approach “would enable a much broader range of potential plaintiffs to bring belated challenges to the agency’s regulations.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.