The six-year period allowed for lawsuits against the U.S. government under the Administrative Procedure Act begins accruing when an injury begins, not when a regulatory action is finalized, the Supreme Court ruled today. In a 6-3 decision issued on the final day of the court’s 2023-24 term, the court resolved a split among different circuit courts in how the statute of limitations is triggered.
The decision allows Corner Post, a North Dakota convenience store, to move forward with its challenge to the debit interchange fee caps set in 2011 under the Federal Reserve’s Regulation II. Corner Post opened in 2018 and filed suit in 2021 asserting that Reg II as unlawful under the APA. In her majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett cites case law that “a right accrues when it comes into existence” and a legal dictionary definition that “a cause of action accrues ‘on [the] date that damage is sustained and not [the] date when causes are set in motion which ultimately produce injury.’”
In a dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson remarked that Corner Post, combined with the Loper Bright Enterprises decision last week overruling “Chevron deference,” would “invite and enable a wave of regulatory challenges—decisions that carry with them the possibility that well-established agency rules will be upended in ways that were previously unimaginable. . . . Now, every legal claim conceived of in those last four decades—and before—can possibly be brought before courts newly unleashed from the constraints of any such deference.”
The ruling did not reach a decision on the merits in Corner Post’s lawsuit, which is now expected to return to the trial court for further proceedings. In 2014, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected retailers’ arguments that Reg II’s fee caps were too high, and in 2015 the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the circuit court’s decision.
