A noteworthy opinion from the Court of Federal Claims in Petro-Hunt LLC v. United States, No. 00-512L (Apr. 26, 2016), dismissing a claim for a judicial taking for lack of subject matter jurisdiction because the claim would require the CFC, an article I court, to review the actions of the Fifth Circuit, an article III court. The CFC concluded that in this situation, the Federal Circuit holds there's no jurisdiction.
The takings case came about after the Fifth Circuit held that the plaintiff did not own mineral leases in Louisiana because under federal common law, it did not acquire any rights by prescription. The plaintiff asserts in the CFC that this is a taking because the Fifth Circuit's ruling altered its previously-established rights by changing the law. The court accepted that fact as true, but concluded that the CFC has no jurisdiction to tell the Fifth Circuit it was wrong:
Indeed, deciding Petro-Hunt’s current claim on the merits would require this court to determine if Petro-Hunt had an established property right that was taken by the Fifth Circuit. See Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Fla. Dep’t of Envtl. Prot., 560 U.S. at 715 (plurality opinion). The only way to determine if Petro-Hunt had an established property right in the mineral servitudes is to decide whether the mineral servitudes had prescribed, as a matter of federal common law, to the United States prior to the Fifth Circuit’s 2007 decision. In other words, this court would have to determine if the Fifth Circuit was correct in its finding that Little Lake Misere and Central Pines established that lands sold to the United States before the enactment of Act 315, like the surface lands in question here, were subject to Louisiana’s ten-year prescription rule. See Petro-Hunt, L.L.C. v. United States, 365 F.3d at 392–93. If the Fifth Circuit was correct in this finding, then Petro-Hunt lost possession of its land long before the 2007 Fifth Circuit decision and it had no established property right that could have been taken by the court’s decision. If the Fifth Circuit was incorrect in its application of precedent, and actually created a new rule depriving Petro-Hunt of its previously established property, then the Fifth Circuit may have effected a compensable taking of Petro-Hunt’s mineral servitudes. This court lacks jurisdiction to determine whether or not the Fifth Circuit correctly interpreted its own precedent, and, therefore, lacks jurisdiction over plaintiff’s judicial takings claim. See Shinnecock Indian Nation v. United States, 782 F.3d at 1348, 1352–53; Allustiarte v. United States, 256 F.3d at 1352.
Slip op. at 20.
Petro-Hunt, LLC v. United States, No. 00-512L (Fed. Cl. Apr. 26, 2016)
