In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that federal courts have jurisdiction to hear lawsuits under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

The decision was not entirely surprising after a November 28, 2011, oral argument where the Justices expressed frustration with the wording of the statute, with Justice Antonin Scalia calling the Act “weird.”

The plaintiff filed suit in federal court, alleging that the defendant used a robocall system to repeatedly call him about a debt.

The Eleventh Circuit dismissed the suit, holding that the federal courts do not have jurisdiction to hear cases under the Act, which empowers individual plaintiffs to bring a private right of action “in an appropriate court of that state.”

But the Supreme Court reversed, saying that the TCPA’s provision for private actions did not make state courts the exclusive forum for the suits.

“Nothing in the text, structure, purpose, or legislative history of the TCPA calls for displacement” of the jurisdiction given to federal courts where a federal law creates a private right of action and furnishes the substantive rules of decision, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote.

“Beyond doubt, the TCPA is a federal law that both creates the claim [the plaintiff] has brought and supplies the substantive rules that will govern the case. We find no convincing reason to read into the TCPA’s permissive grant of jurisdiction to state courts any barrier to the U.S. District Courts’ exercise of the general federal-question jurisdiction they have possessed since 1875.”

State and federal courts therefore have concurrent jurisdiction over TCPA cases, and plaintiffs may file in either venue, the Court said.

To read the decision in Mims v. Arrow Financial Services, click here.
http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/10-1195.pdf

Why it matters: The case resolves a split in the federal courts, which had reached different conclusions when determining whether they had jurisdiction to hear TCPA cases. In the decision, the Justices also addressed one of the defendant’s arguments about the impact on federal courts if they were to hear TCPA cases. Despite the defendant’s contention that the courts would be “inundated” with suits involving minor amounts of statutory damages, the Court dismissed such floodgates concerns, calling it “more imaginary than real.”