The US Supreme Court Monday announced that it had granted review to three additional cases dealing with civil procedure, bankruptcy law, and workers’ compensation. The announcement marked the court’s first regularly scheduled order list in almost a month, as the justices returned from their recess for the winter holidays.
The first case, United States v. Washington, deals with the federal government’s challenge to a state worker’s compensation law in Washington. It involves 10,000 federal workers employed at the Hanford Site, a former nuclear production complex operated by the US government from 1943 to 1971.
The site was the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world and produced material used in the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II. It also generated a significant amount of radioactive waste that has led to environmental and occupational health concerns. The issue at hand is whether workers at the cleanup site are eligible for a worker’s compensation law passed by the Washington legislature in 2018, or if such a law is barred by principles of intergovernmental immunity.
The state’s legislature amended its workers’ compensation law to cover 100,000 former and current federal contract workers who performed work at the site over the past 70 years. The amended law presumes that occupational diseases resulting from work at the radioactive site should trigger benefits eligibility. The federal government argued that such laws expose it and federal contractors to “massive new costs” that similarly situated state and private employers don’t incur, according to a Bloomberg report. The Ninth Circuit justices upheld the law, and the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to take up the case.
The second case, Siegel v. Fitzgerald, deals with fees in bankruptcy court. The Bankruptcy Judgeship Act, passed in 2017, increased fees in some bankruptcy courts but not in others. The Supreme Court will decide if this violates a provision in the Constitution’s bankruptcy clause that directs Congress to establish “uniform laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States.” The fees in question were challenged by a trustee for Circuit City and were ruled unconstitutional by the Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. On appeal, the fees were upheld by the Fourth Circuit.
The final case, Kemp v. United States, deals with civil procedure. The case considers whether a district court can reopen a judgment under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b)(1). Under this rule, the district court can reopen a judgment because of a “mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect,” if the original judgment was based on a legal error by the district court. The district court rejected Kemp’s post-conviction motion as untimely, and it was upheld by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. The Supreme Court granted review despite opposition from the Justice Department, which said this issue at hand rarely comes up.
