4th Circuit Wrongly Deferred to FCC Junk Fax Interpretation, PDR Tells High Court
PDR Network said its junk fax case in the Supreme Court rests on a "simple" premise that when Congress vests a federal court with power to impose liability for alleged statutory violations, it ordinarily also intends to vest the court…
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with power to determine the statute's meaning. PDR said a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision "proceeds from the opposite premise," reading the Hobbs Act to strip jurisdiction from U.S. district courts "to consider dispositive statutory questions" because an agency had weighed in on those questions. The appellate court "thus treated the Hobbs Act as though it gives agencies, rather than courts, the final word as to what federal law means," the petitioner told the high court Tuesday in PDR Network v. Carlton & Harris Chiropractic, in docket 17-1705. "The Fourth Circuit was wrong to ascribe such revolutionary meaning to a statute as ordinary as the Hobbs Act." Carlton & Harris sued PDR after receiving its fax advertising a digital version of a physician's reference book. The Supreme Court in November agreed to review whether the act required a district court to accept an FCC "unsolicited advertisement" interpretation under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (see 1811130027).