Live blog of orders and opinions | April 2, 2018
This live blog features discussion of today's grant (Stokeling v. U.S.), summary reversal (Kisela v. Harris) and merits decision (Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro).
3rd & 7 37yd
3rd & 7 37yd
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Court rules that it does not need to decide whether Kisela violated the Fourth Amendment when it used deadly force against Hughes. "For even assuming a Fourth Amendment violation occurred--a proposition that is not at all evident-- on these facts Kisela was at least entitled to qualified immunity."
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We only got one opinion last week: in Hall v. Hall, which was argued in January. So that ruling didn't shed much light on who might be writing in some of the other cases earlier in the term. We are still waiting for four, I believe, from October: Epic Systems v. Lewis (arbitration), Gill v. Whitford (partisan gerrymandering), Jesner v. Arab Bank (Alien Tort Statute & corporations), and Sessions v. Dimaya (immigration).
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For the October cases, four remain and four justices have yet to write a decision for that period: Gorsuch, Roberts, Kagan, and Kennedy.
It should also be noted that Kennedy has not written any opinion (affirm, concurring, or dissent) for almost 6 months, his longest period on record. -
I don't know if this would count as "overruling" a case, but Puerto Rico v. Franklin was decided June 13, 2016; followed by the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) enacted June 30, 2016. This had to do with bankruptcy law and Puerto Rico.
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Question in the case is whether the exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act's overtime-pay requirement for "any salesman, partsman or mechanic primarily engaged in selling or servicing automobiles" at car dealerships applies to service advisors -- the people who consult with you about your car's service requirements and sell you service on your car. The answer is that service advisors are exempt from the overtime requirement.
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The FLSA has an exemption for:“any salesman, partsman, or mechanic primarily engaged in selling or servicing automobiles” at a covered dealership.People who sell cars are covered; people who do mechanical service are covered -- but what about people who sell mechanical service. One could easily conclude, I think, that Congress would have covered them, too: Why would Congress leave that narrow band of dealership employee out of the mix? But they seem to fall somewhere just outside the enacted text. The dissenters no doubt feel that if this case were about something other than plaintiffs bringing a cause of action against employers, the strict textualists in the majority would rediscover their insistence on adhering precisely to the enacted text.
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This is the kind of case where Justice Scalia's absence is felt -- would have been fun to see a fight between, say, him and Kagan over what this text says. It would also be possible to imagine him saying that the text says what it says, and it doesn't say precisely what the defendants say, and that's Congress's problem rather than the Court's.
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My guess is that service advisors didn't really exist when the exemption was created, which informs what Congress thought it was doing, but not the meaning of the text it enacted. And this is central to one of the "meta" fights about textualism that I'm pointing out here. Some people want to divine, at least if it seems obvious, what Congress was trying to do with the information it had at the time; some people think we just figure out what the words in the text meant to Congress at the time, and work from there. I think those methods probably point in opposite directions in this case.
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I'm off to write up today's orders. We likely won't be back until April 17, which is the next day that the court is likely to issue opinions. (No conference this week, and the court is hearing arguments starting on April 16, so we would expect orders on the 16th but no opinions.)