Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in United States v. Tohono O’odham Nation, No. 09-846 (cert. granted Apr. 19, 2010), the case involving the scope of the Court of Federal Claims’ subject matter jurisdiction. The transcript of the argument is posted here, and in a new feature, the Court has also released the audio recording (28mb mp3) in case you want to follow along, or just put in on your podcast list and listen to it on the way to work on Monday.
Disclosure: we filed an amicus brief supporting the Tohono O’odham Nation.
At the heart of the case is 28 U.S.C. § 1500 which provides:
The United States Court of Federal Claims shall not have jurisdiction of any claim for or in respect to which the plaintiff or his assignee has pending in any other court any suit or process against the United States or any person who, at the time when the cause of action alleged in such suit or process arose, was, in respect thereto, acting or professing to act, directly or indirectly under the authority of the United States.
For more than a century, the federal government has held substantial funds and 2.9 million acres of land in Arizona in trust for the Tohono O’odham Nation. The Supreme Court is considering whether the CFC has jurisdiction over the the Nation’s claim against the federal government for damages under the Indian Tucker Act for alleged breaches of the government’s fiduciary duties to the Nation. The government asserted the CFC was deprived of jurisdiction because the Nation earlier had filed a separate lawsuit in the D.C. District Court, seeking an equitable accounting from the government of the Nation’s trust assets.
The CFC concluded section 1500 deprived it of jurisdiction, and dismissed. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed 2-1, holding that the Nation’s CFC complaint seeks different relief than the district court action, and thus § 1500 did not deprive the CFC of jurisdiction. The Federal Circuit opinion is available here.
Why is a case involving the Indian Tucker Act and the technicalities of the CFC’s subject matter jurisdiction showing up in the pages of this blog? In addition to being a fascinating case, a claimed limitation on the CFC’s jurisdiction is of interest to anyone who follows regulatory takings actions against the federal goverment, as our amicus brief makes clear. While the Justices did not focus on the takings aspects during the argument, the court’s decision in the case could impact on the court’s jurisdiction in takings cases where a property owner also challenges the legitimacy of the regulatory conduct that is alleged to be a taking.
We’re not going to recap the argument, since SCOTUSblog has posted a summary. In our opinion, the most interesting observation is that the Justices did not focus on the language of the statute (“for or in respect to which”), but rather on the nature of the two complaints filed by the Nation. If, as SCOTUSblog surmises, the Justices may avoid ruling what the statutory text means, and instead are questioning whether the Nation’s complaints seek the same relief despite the Federal Circuit concluding the complaints sought separate relief because the CFC complaint sought legal remedies, while the District Court complaint sought the equitable remedy of an accounting, that leaves us wondering why the Court accepted the case in the first place. Parsing the factual allegations in a complaint and determining what relief it seeks seems to us like a task better suited to the lower courts.