Publications

The Court continued its slow drip of decisions in less-prominent cases this week with Wilkins v. United States (No. 21-1164), which addressed whether the limitations period for suits against the government under the Quiet Title Act is “jurisdictional” or not. But this time, the decision wasn’t unanimous, with six of the justices concluding the limitations period was simply a non-jurisdictional defense, over a dissent from three of the Court’s conservatives.

Petitioners Larry Steven Wilkins and Jane Stanton own property along Robbins Gulch Road in Montana. Way back in 1962, the previous owners of their properties granted the federal government an easement to use the road. The Government interpreted the easement to include rights of public access, which caused some friction with Wilkins and Stanton, who didn’t like members of the public trespassing, stealing, and quite rudely shooting Wilkins’s cat. They sued the Government in 2018 under the Quiet Title Act, which waives sovereign immunity from challenges involving federal property rights. However, the statute also includes a 12-year time limit, 28 U.S.C. § 2409a(g), and Wilkins and Stanton acquired their properties (and learned of the easement) in 1991 and 2003, respectively. The Government therefore moved to dismiss, arguing that this time limit was jurisdictional. Wilkins and Stanton argued that the time limit was merely a “claims processing” rule, and that the District Court could consider their excuses for filing late. The District Court sided with the Feds and the Ninth Circuit affirmed. But recognizing a split among the circuits as to whether Section 2409a(g) created a jurisdictional bar to suit, the Supreme Court granted cert.

In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Sotomayor (and joined by Justices Kagan, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Jackson), the Supreme Court reversed, holding that the 12-year time limit for an action under the Quiet Title Act is not jurisdictional. Sotomayor began by explaining the difference between “claims-processing rules,” which help courts adjudicate disputes in an orderly and predictable fashion, and jurisdictional rules, which dictate whether courts have authority to adjudicate those disputes at all. That distinction is important for many reasons: For example, an argument that a plaintiff violated a claims-processing rule generally must be asserted at the outset of a case or else it is waived, whereas a jurisdictional defect can be raised at any time, including by courts sua sponte. Because jurisdictional requirements can make cases messy (e.g., requiring decisions to be vacated after years of litigation based on some missed jurisdictional technicality), courts will normally treat a time limit as jurisdictional only if Congress “clearly states” that it is. Here, Sotomayor concluded that Section 2409a(g) used “mundane statute-of-limitations language,” providing no indication that Congress intended the 12-year period to be a “jurisdictional” bar.

Next, Sotomayor addressed three earlier Supreme Court decisions that seemed to indicate that Section 2409a(g) was, in fact, jurisdictional. True, the Court had previously used the word “jurisdictional” to describe the statute. But it didn’t really mean it. Those earlier decisions were what have come to be derisively called “drive-by jurisdictional rulings” that should receive no precedential effect. In order to be precedential, Sotomayor explained, those decisions would have needed to address whether the provision at issue was “technically jurisdictional”—meaning it is a genuine limit on courts’ authority to hear the case—and the cases’ outcome must have actually turned on that characterization. Neither was true of those cases, so they weren’t precedential.

Finally, Sotomayor rejected the idea that any limitation on a waiver of sovereign immunity (like the 12-year time limit in the Quiet Title Act, which allows an individual to sue the otherwise-immune federal government) is inherently jurisdictional. She pointed to other cases where the Court had acknowledged that waivers of sovereign immunity must be strictly construed but nevertheless determined that some time limits may be subject to equitable tolling, demonstrating that they are not inherently jurisdictional even in the sovereign-immunity context.

Justice Thomas dissented, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. They disagreed with both the majority’s conclusions. First, Thomas contended that the requirement for a “clear statement” from Congress before courts could treat a time limit as jurisdictional doesn’t apply when Congress waived sovereign immunity and allowed suits against the government. In that context (which includes the Quiet Title Act here), courts must construe the waiver of immunity narrowly, treating limitations on the waiver as jurisdictional. That is because courts lack jurisdiction to decide suits against the government unless it has consented to suit, and when the government consents to suit, it does so only under the particular conditions set out in the statute that waives its sovereign immunity. Second, he reviewed the prior precedents that the majority described as “drive-by jurisdictional rulings,” concluding that the Court in those cases had definitively concluded that the time limit under the Quiet Title Act was jurisdictional. For those two reasons, Justice Thomas would have affirmed the Ninth Circuit.

Dave and Tadhg