Coming up in October, the Supreme Court starts a new term and hears new cases. Here’s a quick look at three cases the Justices will consider during their first week of arguments.
Currently, there are 38 cases on the Court’s docket that have been accepted for arguments. There will be more added, especially when the Court has its “long conference” about one week before the official start of the 2018 term. And 10 cases already are scheduled on the October calendar.
The first case on the Court’s October calendar is one we’ve covered several times on Constitution Daily – about frogs. In Weyerhaeuser v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Court will try to settle a dispute over land in Louisiana dedicated to protecting a frog species that doesn’t live there.
The Fish and Wildlife Service ordered a 1,500-acre tract of privately owned land protected as a potential breeding and living space for the frogs, which currently reside in Mississippi and were once believed to live in the Louisiana land tract in question in the 1960s. The land tract’s owners want to develop the land and harvest its timber. (Formerly known as the Mississippi Gopher Frog, the amphibians also once hopped around Alabama.)
Weyerhaeuser’s lawyers have asked the Court to settle two questions. First, does the Endangered Species Act prohibit the designation of private land as unoccupied critical habitat that is neither habitat nor essential to species conservation? And second, “whether an agency decision not to exclude an area from critical habitat because of the economic impact of designation is subject to judicial review?”
The second case scheduled for arguments on October 1 asks the Court to define the meaning of ambiguous language in a 1974 amended congressional act about employment-age discrimination.
In Mount Lemmon Fire District v. Guido, Congress amended the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (or ADEA) to broaden its original definition. As first enacted in 1967, the ADEA applied to private business entities with 25 or more employees. The 1974 act changed the threshold to 20 employees in one section of the law. Another section expanded coverage to employers who are “a State or political subdivision of a State and any agency or instrumentality of a State or a political subdivision of a State, and any interstate agency.”
However, since the two provisions weren’t directly linked in the law's language, there is a dispute about whether the ADEA applies to state and local political subdivisions with 20 or more employees, or all state and local political subdivisions. The Mount Lemmon Fire District in Arizona had 11 employees in 2009 when it laid off two workers for six months, who argued they were age-discrimination victims. A federal district court sided with Mount Lemmon, but the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court ruled for the two workers. In prior cases, three other federal appeals court ruled the ADEA applied to political subdivisions with at least 20 employees. The split among the federal appeals courts sent the case to the Supreme Court.
On October 3, the Court will hear arguments about a dispute over an alleged cemetery and the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. In Knick v. Township of Scott, Rose Mary Knick owns property in a rural township in Lackawanna County. In 2012, the Scott Township passed an ordinance that private property owners had to allow public access to any cemeteries that existed on their property. The ordinance defined cemeteries as a “place or area of ground, whether contained on private or public property, which has been set apart for or otherwise utilized as a burial place for deceased human beings.”
In 2008, the township investigated reports that several people may have been buried in a family plot on Knick’s 90-acre property, including a Revolutionary War veteran. Knick said she didn’t know of such a plot and it wasn’t indicated on property records. In 2013, a township inspection officer entered Knick’s property without a warrant, identified several stones as alleged grave markers, and fined Knick.
Knick argued the township’s actions violated her Fourth Amendment rights as an unauthorized search and her Fifth Amendment rights as a taking of property. But after her claims failed in state court, Knick went to the Third Circuit Court, which said Knick hadn’t exhausted of her remedies in state court.
The bigger questions in Knick v. Township of Scott are about a 1985 decision called Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank. Knick’s attorneys want the Court to clarify if under Williamson County that property owners must exhaust all state court remedies before pursuing action in a federal court in a case about a Fifth Amendment takings claim. They also want a ruling about takings lawsuits in as-written, or facial claims, where a law’s language on its own is unconstitutional and the dispute can proceed to federal court directly and bypass Williamson County.
Scott Bomboy is editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
