The U.S. Supreme Court didn’t rule on its widely anticipated Obamacare or same-sex marriage cases on Monday, but it did issue decisions that could have important impacts on privacy and agricultural price-support programs.
However, the Court added this Thursday as its next decision day, meaning that at least one of the Court’s high-profile cases could be announced later this week. Next Monday, June 30, is the only other scheduled decision day for the Court, at least for now.
In addition to King v. Burwell (the Obamacare case) and Obergefell v. Hodges (the same-sex marriage case), outstanding Court cases include pending decisions on lethal injections, voter redistricting and housing discrimination.
Today, among the four opinions announced was Horne v. Department of Agriculture, in which Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in an 8-1 decision. The Court reversed a lower court decision and found that a family of California raisin growers deserved just compensation after the state impounded parts of their crops in a price-support program.
“The Fifth Amendment requires that the Government pay just compensation when it takes personal property, just as when it takes real property,” said Chief Justice Roberts.
Roberts also didn’t send the case back to a lower court. “There is accordingly no need for a remand; the Hornes should simply be relieved of the obligation to pay the fine and associated civil penalty they were assessed when they resisted the Government’s effort to take their raisins. This case, in litigation for more than a decade, has gone on long enough,” Roberts said.
The privacy case was Los Angeles v. Patel and involved the ability of local police to access guest register lists at hotels. In the 5-4 decision, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that a Los Angeles law that required hotel operators to record and keep specific information about their guests on the premises for a 90-day period was unconstitutional.
The law allowed for the records to be “made available to any officer of the Los Angeles Police Department for inspection . . . at a time and in a manner that minimizes any interference with the operation of the business.”
“We hold facial challenges can be brought under the Fourth Amendment. We further hold that the provision of the Los Angeles Municipal Code that requires hotel operators to make their registries available to the police on demand is facially unconstitutional because it penalizes them for declining to turn over their records without affording them any opportunity for pre-compliance review,” Sotomayor said.
In a third case, the Court ruled in Kimble v. Marvel that once a patent expires, the patent holder doesn’t have to pay royalty fees to the original inventor when using it. In this case, the patent was for a web-slinging toy related to the Spider-Man franchise.
Justice Elena Kagan said in the majority opinion that the Court needed to adhere to its 1964 decision in Brulotte v. Thys Co. about patent-royalty rights.
