Congressional Court Watcher: Recent Appellate Decisions of Interest to Lawmakers (April 15–April 21, 2024)
Legal Sidebari
Congressional Court Watcher: Recent
Appellate Decisions of Interest to Lawmakers
(April 15–April 21, 2024)
April 23, 2024
The federal courts issue hundreds of decisions every week in cases involving diverse legal disputes. This
Sidebar series selects decisions from the past week that may be of particular interest to federal lawmakers,
focusing on orders and decisions of the Supreme Court and precedential decisions of the courts of appeals
for the thirteen federal circuits. Selected cases typically involve the interpretation or validity of federal
statutes and regulations, or constitutional issues relevant to Congress’s lawmaking and oversight
functions.
Some cases identified in this Sidebar, or the legal questions they address, are examined in other CRS
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Decisions of the Supreme Court
Last week, the Supreme Court issued opinions in four cases:
• Civil Rights: The Court unanimously ruled that the lower courts had applied the wrong
standard when deciding a case involving a police officer who argued that her transfer to
another department component was unlawful employment discrimination and retaliation
under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The controlling opinion, joined by six
Justices, held that Title VII bars discrimination in transfer decisions without need for a
separate court determination that the decision caused a “significant” harm to the
transferee (Muldrow v. City of St. Louis).
• Criminal Law & Procedure: The Court unanimously held that a federal district court
judge’s failure to adhere to the requirements for entering a preliminary criminal forfeiture
order under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 32.2 does not automatically prevent the
issuance of an order at sentencing and instead is subject to harmless-error principles on
appellate review (McIntosh v. United States).
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• Property: In a 9-0 ruling, the Court held that a Texas law provided plaintiffs with a cause
of action to bring suit seeking just compensation from the state for an alleged violation of
the Takings Clause of the Constitution, and therefore the Court declined to reach the
question for which certiorari had initially been granted: whether federal courts may
entertain claims for just compensation against a state under the Takings Clause directly or
whether an authorizing statute is required to bring suit (DeVillier v. Texas).
• Veterans: In a 7-2 decision, the Court held that a veteran with distinct periods of
qualifying service for education benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill and the
earlier Montgomery GI Bill was separately entitled to benefits under each. The Court
further held that the veteran could use his benefits under each statute, in any order, up to
the 48-month aggregate-benefits cap found in 38 U.S.C. § 3695 (Rudisill v. McDonough).
The Supreme Court also took action on an emergency application:
• Health: Over the opposition of three Justices, the Court partially stayed a preliminary
injunction in a case challenging the constitutionality of an Idaho criminal statute that bars
health care professionals from providing certain medical treatments to transgender
minors. Because of the stay, Idaho may generally enforce the law except as to the
plaintiffs in the case during the pendency of the litigation (Labrador v. Poe).
Decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals
Topic headings marked with an asterisk (*) indicate cases where the appellate court’s controlling opinion
recognizes a split among the federal appellate courts on a key legal issue resolved in the opinion,
contributing to a non-uniform application of the law among the circuits.
• Bankruptcy: The Fourth Circuit held that property owned by a debtor and his spouse as
a tenancy by the entirety was not exempted from the debtor’s bankruptcy estate under 11
U.S.C. § 522(b)(3)(B) to the extent of the debtor’s outstanding tax debt to the Internal
Revenue Service (IRS). Section 522(b)(3) exempts from the bankruptcy estate “interest
as a tenant by the entirety” to the extent that it is “exempt from process under applicable
nonbankruptcy law.” The circuit panel held that because a federal tax lien can attach to
one spouse’s interest in an entireties property even when the other spouse is not also
liable for the tax debt, the property is not exempted under Section 522(b)(3)(B) so long as
the IRS has the right to obtain the lien, even if the lien has not yet been perfected against
the property (Morgan v. Bruton).
• Bankruptcy: Agreeing with the Fourth Circuit, a Fifth Circuit panel held that Section
523(a) of the Bankruptcy Code—which limits certain debts from being discharged in
certain bankruptcy proceedings—applies by way of 11 U.S.C. § 1192 to all small
business debtors who undergo Chapter 11, Subchapter V’s streamlined reorganization
process, including both individuals and corporate entities (Matter of GFS Indus., L.L.C.).
• Civil Rights: A divided Fourth Circuit panel held that a West Virginia law, which
prohibits persons whose biological sex was determined at birth to be male from
participating on female sports teams, violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of
1972 as applied to a transgender youth who was taking puberty blocking medication and
publicly identified as a girl, and who sought to participate in her school’s cross country
and track teams for girls. Reversing the lower court, the panel majority held that the state
law violated Title IX’s prohibition on discrimination “on the basis of sex” in educational
programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance, because the law
(1) discriminates on the basis of gender identity, which the Fourth Circuit previously
recognized as sex-based discrimination barred by Title IX; and (2) discriminates on the
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basis of sex assigned at birth by barring transgender girls but not transgender boys from
participating in teams consistent with their gender identity. The panel majority also held
that the lower court erred in dismissing the plaintiff’s claim that the law violated the
Equal Protection Clause as applied to her. In so doing, the majority held that facial
classifications based on gender identity trigger intermediate scrutiny and remanded so the
lower court could consider whether there was a satisfactory justification for denying the
plaintiff participation on the girls’ sports teams. Finally, the court majority observed that
its analysis was limited to the plaintiff’s challenge to the law as applied to her, and that it
did not hold that schools were always required to allow transgender girls to play on girls’
teams even when they had gone through puberty and had elevated levels of circulating
testosterone (B.P.J. v. W. Va. State Bd. of Educ.).
• Criminal Law & Procedure: The Fourth Circuit upheld the convictions of seven
criminal defendants for various gang-related activities, including for attempted murder
and for the use of a firearm while committing a “crime of violence” under 18 U.S.C.
§ 924(c). In so doing, the court held that an attempted offense constitutes a crime of
violence when the completed offense invariably requires the use of force and a mens rea
more culpable than recklessness. Applying this standard, the court decided that the
defendants’ attempted murder convictions constituted crimes of violence subject to
sentence enhancements under Section 924(c) (United States v. Hunt).
• Food & Drug: The Federal Circuit reversed a lower court’s decision that a child was not
entitled to compensation under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act due to
vaccine-related injury, after deciding that the lower court applied an inappropriately
narrow definition of “surgical intervention” under 42 U.S.C. § 300aa-11(c)(1)(D)(iii)
when determining whether the injury constituted recoverable harm. The circuit panel
disagreed with the lower court that the “surgical intervention” must be used to directly
treat or change the course of a vaccine-related injury; instead, the panel held that the term
includes surgical acts that may be either diagnostic or therapeutic when done to prevent
harm or improve the health of the patient (Leming v. Sec’y of Health & Hum. Servs.).
• Firearms: The Eighth Circuit rejected a Second Amendment challenge to 18 U.S.C.
§ 922(g)(3), which makes it a criminal offense for a person to possess a firearm while
unlawfully using or addicted to a controlled substance. Applying the framework
established by the Supreme Court in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen,
the panel majority assumed that drug users were among the “people” protected by the
Second Amendment. The majority also decided that the current prohibition on firearm
possession by drug users was not closely comparable to firearm restrictions on
intoxicated persons in place at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification. Still, the
majority concluded that Section 922(g)(3) was analogous to historical restrictions on
firearm possession by mentally ill persons and those brandishing firearms in a manner
likely to terrify others, and the majority therefore decided the statute did not facially
violate the Second Amendment. The court left unresolved, however, whether certain
applications of Section 922(g)(3) might not satisfy the Bruen test (United States v.
Veasley).
• *Labor & Employment: In a per curiam opinion, a Sixth Circuit panel upheld the Social
Security Administration’s denial of disability insurance benefits and supplemental
security income where the petitioner was found to have transferrable skills that would
enable her to find work in two other occupational fields despite her physical impairments.
Governing regulations provide that a person of “advanced age” at the alleged onset of a
disability are to be treated as disabled unless an administrative law judge finds that her
skills are “readily transferable to a significant range of semi-skilled or skilled work that is
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within [her] functional capacity.” The circuit panel disagreed with the Ninth Circuit’s
interpretation of a “significant range of ... work” as requiring a finding that the applicant
could find employment in at least three different occupational fields. Instead, the panel
understood this phrase to mean that the applicant could undertake a substantial number of
other jobs, even if those jobs were in two or fewer occupational fields (Hamilton v.
Comm’r of Soc. Security).
Author Information
Michael John Garcia
Deputy Assistant Director/ALD
Congressional Research Service
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