Congressional Court Watcher: Recent Appellate Decisions of Interest to Lawmakers (April 22–April 28, 2024)
Legal Sidebari
Congressional Court Watcher: Recent
Appellate Decisions of Interest to Lawmakers
(April 22–April 28, 2024)
April 29, 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 granted certiorari in two cases:
• Civil Rights: The Court agreed to hear a case from the Fourth Circuit on whether, under
the Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Awards Act of 1976, obtaining preliminary injunction
may confer “prevailing party” status for attorney’s fees purposes even if the party does
not secure a final judgment (Lackey v. Stinnie).
• Firearms: The Court agreed to hear a case from the Fifth Circuit on whether a Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives rule, which requires serial numbers on
certain disassembled parts of firearms for tracing purposes, is a valid exercise of the
agency’s regulatory authority over firearms under the Gun Control Act. Last year, the
Court stayed a district court’s vacatur of the so-called “ghost gun” rule in its entirety,
allowing the rule to go into effect pending the disposition of the case (Garland v.
Vanderstok).
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Decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals
• Criminal Law & Procedure: The Second Circuit interpreted the meaning of 18 U.S.C.
§ 3624(e), which governs the supervised release of a former federal prisoner, as it applies
to a person released from federal custody and transferred to state authorities for pre-trial
detention in state proceedings. The panel held that the term of supervised release under
Section 3624(e) begins after the person’s imprisonment by federal and state authorities
ends, not upon release from federal custody (United States v. Freeman).
• Criminal Law & Procedure: The Second Circuit joined other circuits in recognizing
that aiding and abetting an offense that is a “crime of violence” under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)
is itself a “crime of violence.” Thus, a person convicted of aiding or abetting a crime of
violence may face enhanced penalties if a firearm or other destructive device was used in
the furtherance of the offense (Medunjanin v. United States).
• Communications: A Ninth Circuit panel agreed with a lower court’s decision not to
preliminarily enjoin a California rule to support the state’s universal service fund, under
which telecommunications carriers would be assessed surcharges based on their number
of active accounts in the state. The panel decided that the plaintiff carriers were unlikely
to succeed on the merits in their preemption challenge to the state rule. The panel
construed 47 U.S.C. § 254(f), which preempts state policies that are “inconsistent” with
federal rules to advance universal service, to render unenforceable only those state
policies that burden compliance with federal requirements. The panel acknowledged that
the state’s account-based carrier assessment differed from the approach used to support
the federal universal service fund, which assesses carriers’ obligations based on revenue.
The panel decided that this difference did not trigger preemption because the state rule
did not discriminate between providers or interfere with federal universal service efforts
(Assurance Wireless USA, L.P. v. Reynolds).
• Environmental Law: Applying a deferential standard of review, a divided Ninth Circuit
upheld a lower court’s preliminary injunction that narrowed the time period during which
Montana could authorize wolf trapping and snaring, based on concerns that such
activities could result in the unlawful take of grizzly bears in violation of Section 9 of the
Endangered Species Act. The panel remanded the case, however, and directed the lower
court to modify the scope of the injunction consistent with the majority’s holding that the
injunction was overbroad both as to geographic scope and in its application to the
trapping and snaring of wolves by the state for research (Flathead-Lolo-Bitterroot Citizen
Task Force v. Montana).
• Firearms: Affirming the lower court’s denial of a preliminary injunction request, the
Fifth Circuit panel agreed with the lower court that the plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed
in their Second Amendment challenge to provisions in the Bipartisan Safer Communities
Act of 2022 that expanded firearms background checks for 18- to 20-year-olds. The panel
emphasized statements made by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller and
N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen that such laws were presumptively constitutional.
Given these statements, the panel found it unnecessary to apply Bruen’s general
framework for assessing the constitutionality of a challenged firearms restriction, which
the panel characterized as not applying to those certain commonplace firearms
regulations that the Court separately described as presumptively permissible (McRorey v.
Garland).
• Health: On remand from the Supreme Court, a divided Seventh Circuit reaffirmed its
earlier decision to allow a hospital to move forward in its suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to
compel Illinois, in its administration of the state’s Medicaid program, to enforce a
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provision of the Medicaid Act (42 U.S.C. § 1396u-2(f)) directing Medicaid-managed care
organizations to make timely payments to health care providers. The majority decided
that the provision, which Congress enacted as an exercise of its Spending Clause power,
included necessary rights-creating language to be enforceable through a Section 1983
suit. The Supreme Court had vacated the Seventh Circuit’s earlier decision and had
remanded it for reconsideration in light of the Supreme Court’s intervening decision in
Health & Hospital Corporation of Marion County v. Talevski, which considered a similar
issue. On remand, the majority of the Seventh Circuit panel described its conclusion as
consistent with the reasoning of Talevski (Saint Anthony Hosp. v. Whitehorn).
• Immigration: The Tenth Circuit upheld the Board of Immigration Appeals’ (BIA’s)
interpretation of 8 U.S.C. § 1229b(b)(1)(D) concerning when an alien may be granted
cancellation of removal because removal would create an “exceptional and extremely
unusual hardship to the alien’s ... [U.S. citizen] child.” Federal immigration law defines a
child as “an unmarried person under twenty-one years of age,” meaning that a potentially
qualifying relative may age out of that designation. Applying the Chevron doctrine, the
circuit court determined that Section 1229b(b)(1)(D) was ambiguous as to when the age
of the qualifying relative is to be determined, and the panel deferred to the BIA’s
determination that the age of the qualifying “child” should be fixed at a date no later than
when the immigration judge closes the administrative record (Rangel-Fuentes v.
Garland).
• Indian Law: A divided Federal Circuit panel issued a mixed ruling on appeal from a
lower court’s dismissal of claims brought by the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and
Ouray Indian Reservation (Tribe) against the United States concerning water rights and
infrastructure. The majority held that neither the Winters doctrine—which holds that the
federal government’s reservation of lands for tribal use implicitly reserves rights for
tribes to use needed water from various sources—nor an 1899 law appropriating funds
for water-related infrastructure on the Tribe’s reservation imposed a trust obligation on
the United States to construct new infrastructure or to affirmatively secure new water for
the Tribe. The court decided, however, that a 1906 statute did establish trust duties with
respect to some existing irrigation systems on the Tribe’s reservation, and that the lower
court improperly dismissed certain breach of trust claims flowing from that statute (Ute
Indian Tribe of the Uintah & Ouray Indian Rsrv. v. United States).
• Sovereign Immunity: The D.C. Circuit affirmed a lower court’s quashing of a writ of
execution, which sought to obtain assets of the Afghan government held by the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, based on immunities conferred to
those two entities by the International Organizations Immunities Act (IOIA) and
incorporated provisions of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). Relying on the
Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 (TRIA), the plaintiffs sought to enforce default
judgments against the Taliban for terrorist-related activities by obtaining assets of the
Afghan government and Afghan central bank that were held by the IMF and World Bank.
The panel ruled that, while TRIA broadened the circumstances for abrogating the
immunity from execution afforded to certain terrorist parties’ blocked assets, TRIA makes
no provision as to jurisdictional immunity. Accordingly, the panel held that, because the
IMF and World Bank are immune from federal jurisdiction under FSIA as incorporated
by IOIA, federal courts have no jurisdiction over the plaintiffs’ suit seeking to direct
those entities to release a third party’s assets to enforce a judgment against it (Doe v.
Taliban).
• Transportation: The Ninth Circuit denied a petitioner’s challenge to the Federal
Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) revocation of his pilot certification based on the
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petitioner’s air transport of marijuana within Alaska, where marijuana is legal. The FAA
revoked the petitioner’s pilot certificate under 49 U.S.C. § 44710(b)(2), which provides
that the FAA Administrator “shall” revoke the certificate of a pilot who uses an aircraft to
carry out a controlled substances offense punishable by imprisonment of more than a
year. Federal law makes the transport of marijuana or other controlled substances a
felony. The circuit panel held that Section 44701(b)(2) established a mandatory duty of
the FAA Administrator to revoke the certificate of a person described by the statute, did
not require a pilot to actually have been convicted of a covered offense for revocation to
occur, and only required the pilot to knowingly engage in the proscribed activity,
regardless of whether he knew it was punishable under the law. The panel also rejected
the petitioner’s argument that Congress could not authorize the FAA to regulate purely
intrastate activities like marijuana delivery within Alaska, observing that airspace is a
channel of commerce that falls within Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce
(Fejes v. FAA).
Author Information
Michael John Garcia
Deputy Assistant Director/ALD
Congressional Research Service
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