Justia Government & Administrative Law Opinion Summaries

In three challenged orders, the Commission addressed a "traffic pumping" scheme in which the holder of the filed tariff entered into contractual arrangements with conference calling companies and charged the interexchange carrier the tariff rate for providing switched access service. Farmers, the holder of the tariff, petitioned for review. As a threshold matter, Farmers, joined by intervenor, contended that the Commission lacked authority to overturn its decision in Farmers I because it failed, as 47 U.S.C. 405(b) required, to act within 90 days on Qwest's petition for partial reconsideration and consequently, Farmers I became a final appealable order. The court held that the contention was based on a misreading of the statute. The merits question was whether the Commission properly determined that Farmers was not entitled to bill Qwest for access service under Farmers' tariff because Farmers had not provided interstate "switched access service" as that term was defined in Farmers' federal access tariff. The court held that the Commission, upon considering factors within its expertise, could reasonably conclude that Farmers' relationships with the conference calling companies had been deliberately structured to fall outside the terms of Farmers' tariff and therefore reasonably rejected such services as tariffed services. Therefore, deference to the Commission's determination was appropriate. Accordingly, the court denied the petition.

An association of doctor-owned equipment providers challenged regulations issued by the Secretary that effectively prevented its members from obtaining Medicare reimbursement for their services. The district court dismissed the complaint for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. The court concluded that under the particular circumstances of this case, the Shalala v. Illinois Council on Long Term Care, Inc. exception applied and the association could invoke the district court's federal question jurisdiction without first seeking administrative review under the Medicare Act, 42 U.S.C. 405(h).

PSEG challenged orders of the FERC accepting the results of an auction for electric generation capacity conducted by ISO New England. In those orders, FERC approved ISO New England's determination that PSEG's resources in Connecticut could not reduce their capacity supply obligation because doing so would endanger the system's reliability. FERC also held that ISO New England could reduce the per unit price paid to PSEG for that capacity. The court held that because the latter holding was based on tariff provisions that the FERC thought were clear but now conceded were ambiguous, and because in the course of construing those provisions it failed to respond to PSEG's facially legitimate objections, the petition was granted and the orders were remanded for further consideration.

This case stemmed from the District's adoption of the Firearms Registration Amendment Act of 2008 (FRA), D.C. Law 17-372, which amended the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975, D.C. Law 1-85. Plaintiffs challenged, both facially and as applied to them, the provisions of the District's gun laws, new and old, requiring the registration of firearms and prohibiting both the registration of "assault weapons" and the possession of magazines with a capacity of more than ten rounds of ammunition. Plaintiffs argued those provisions were not within the District's congressionally delegated legislative authority or, if they were, then they violated the Second Amendment. The court held that the District had authority under D.C. law to promulgate the challenged gun laws, and the court upheld as constitutional the prohibitions of assault weapons and of large-capacity magazines and some of the registration requirements. The court remanded the other registration requirements to the district court for further proceedings because the record was insufficient to inform the court's resolution of the important constitutional issues presented.

In a 2008 administrative appeal, the Secretary of Health and Human Services ruled that a Medicare beneficiary enrolled in Medicare Part C still qualified as a person "entitled to benefits" under Medicare Part A. As a result, Beverly Hospital received a smaller reimbursement from the Secretary for services it provided to low-income Medicare beneficiaries during fiscal years 1999-2002. The district court granted summary judgment for Beverly Hospital on the ground that the Secretary's interpretation violated the plain language of the Medicare statute. The court held that the statute did not unambiguously foreclose the Secretary's intepretation. The court, nonetheless, affirmed the district court on the alternative ground that the Secretary must be held to the interpretation that guided her approach to reimbursement calculations during fiscal years 1999-2002, an interpretation that differed from the view she now advanced. Under her previous approach, the hospital would have prevailed on its claim for a larger reimbursement.

Plaintiffs brought this action against the Department of Justice under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. 552, seeking to obtain documents relating to the government's use of cell phone location data in criminal prosecutions. The district court directed the release of certain specified documents and upheld the Department's decision to withhold others. The court affirmed the district court's order requiring the release of the specified documents. The court held, however, that because there were too many factual uncertainties regarding the remaining documents, the court vacated the balance of the district court's decision and remanded the case for further development of the record.

Appellant, as personal representative of her brother's estate, sued to recover damages for the shooting death of her brother by a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detective and contended on appeal that she did not receive a fair trial. The principal issue concerned the district court's rulings on the inadmissibility of portions of an internal MPD report regarding the altercation between the detective and appellant's brother. A related issue involved a violation of the pretrial disclosure requirements of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26. The court held that there was no abuse of discretion by the district court. The record revealed that the district court properly excluded those parts of the report likely to confuse the jury and unfairly prejudice the government. The court held that the government failed to comply with Rule 26(a)(2)(E) by not supplementing the medical expert's disclosure to reflect an interview with the detective on which the expert intended to rely at trial, but that the violation was harmless and so the district court's refusal to strike the expert's testimony was not an abuse of discretion. Accordingly, because appellant's other claims of error and her bias claim were unpersuasive, the court affirmed the judgment.

This case arose when the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), division of the Department of Homeland Security, changed local work assignments for its inspectors without first negotiating with their union. CBP petitioned for review of the Federal Labor Relations Authority's (Authority) affirmance of an arbitrator's conclusion that this was an unfair labor practice. The court denied the petition for review and rejected CBP's argument that it had no duty to bargain over the disputed changes in work assignment policies because the changes were "covered by" the Revised National Inspectional Assignment Policy (RNIAP) and that, in the alternative, that CBP had no duty to bargain over the changes it made pursuant to the RNIAP because they did not alter inspectors' "conditions" of employment. Accordingly, the court deferred to the Authority's reasonable determination that the RNIAP was not a collective bargaining agreement subject to the "covered by" doctrine and the Authority's reasonable conclusion that the cases CBP cited did not govern the dispute here. Therefore, the court held that the Authority adequately explained its conclusion.

Bally's Park Place, Inc. (Bally's) petitioned for review of a decision and order of the NLRB which found that Bally's committed unfair labor practices in violation of sections 8(a)(1) and (3) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), 29 U.S.C. 158(a)(1),(3), when it discharged an employee because of his support for the United Auto Workers. The court held that substantial evidence supported the NLRB's view of the disputed events and that the court would not disturb the NLRB's conclusion that the employee's termination was unlawful. Accordingly, the court denied the petition for review and granted the NLRB's cross-application for enforcement.

Judicial Watch filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. 552(a)(4)(B), asking the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to disclose records of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that showed how much money they gave to political campaigns. At issue was whether the requested documents were "agency records" for purposes of FOIA. The court held that the FHFA's unexercised right to use and dispose of the records requested in this case was not enough to subject those records to FOIA where the FHFA had not read or relied on the records in any way. The court held that because it held that FHFA did not control the records, it need not reach FHFA's alternative argument.