Jackson accuses Barrett majority of turning ‘a deaf ear’ in legal interpretation
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority of turning “a deaf ear” in a case that split the court along party lines over the proper way to interpret legal texts. It was the latest battle in a long-running legal war between the Republican and Democratic appointees’ different approaches, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett leading the way for the majority.
The case, FS Credit Opportunities Corp. v. Saba Capital Master Fund, involved a federal law called the Investment Company Act. In her opinion for the court’s six Republican appointees, Barrett said the question was whether the law lets private parties sue to rescind any contract that allegedly violates the act. “The answer is no,” she wrote, rejecting activist investors and backing investment funds, the Chamber of Commerce and the Trump administration.
“If a statute does not spell out a right of action, we examine the statute’s text and structure to determine whether it implicitly provides one,” the Trump appointee wrote. She said the question was whether the phrase “rescission at the instance of any party” implies that private parties may sue.
“It does not,” she concluded. “In sum, nothing in the text or structure of the ICA indicates that Congress authorized private parties to enforce virtually every provision in the statute. For a cause of action to exist, we would have to create it.”
Jackson said in her dissent that the court betrayed its proper role “to give effect to the will of the people” rather than “supplant it.”
The Biden appointee said the court refused to “consult all reliable indicia of Congress’s intent” or to wrestle with congressional committee reports “that unequivocally expressed Congress’s ‘wish’ that the statute continue to be interpreted to allow private suits.”
She said the court “turns a deaf ear to the unified call of text, statutory structure, and history, and substitutes its own views as to the undesirability of private enforcement.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined Jackson completely. Justice Elena Kagan only joined partly and wrote her own short dissent to explain why. She said her views on the proper use of background legislative history materials, as opposed to only looking at the final text of a law, “fall someplace in between the majority’s and the principal dissent’s. The one-sentence version is: Reliance on legislative history may be appropriate when statutory text in context remains, after careful review, stubbornly ambiguous.”
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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