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Another district court dismisses TCPA action for lack of jurisdiction
On October 29, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio dismissed a TCPA action against an energy service company and “ten John Doe corporations” (collectively, defendants), concluding that the court lacked jurisdiction over cases involving unconstitutional laws. According to the opinion, the plaintiff filed the putative class action against the defendants alleging the companies violated the TCPA by placing pre-recorded calls to the plaintiff’s cell phone without consent. While the action was pending, on July 6, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants Inc. (AAPC) that the government-debt exception in Section 227(b)(1)(A)(iii) of the TCPA is an unconstitutional content-based speech restriction (covered by InfoBytes here). The defendants moved to dismiss the action for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and the court agreed. Specifically, the court agreed with the defendants that the severance of Section 227(b)(1)(A)(iii) must be applied prospectively, thus, the statute can only be applied to robocalls made after July 6 and prior to 2015 (when the now unconstitutional government-debt exception in Section 227(b)(1)(A)(iii) was enacted). Because “the statute at issue was unconstitutional at the time of the alleged violations,” the court concluded it lacked subject-matter jurisdiction over the matter and dismissed the action.
As previously covered by InfoBytes, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana was the first known court to dismiss a TCPA action based on lack of jurisdiction over calls occurring after the exception’s enactment but prior to the Supreme Court’s decision on July 6.
District court: No subject-matter jurisdiction for unconstitutional TCPA section
On September 28, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana granted in part and denied in part a motion to dismiss, concluding that the court lacked subject matter jurisdiction in a TCPA action over 129 out of 130 robocalls made prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 6 decision in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants Inc (AAPC) (covered by InfoBytes here). According to the opinion, the plaintiffs filed a putative class action against a telecommunications company for violating Section 227(b)(1)(A)(iii) of the TCPA, which prohibits robocalls to cell phones without prior express consent. The company moved to dismiss the action, arguing that the Supreme Court decision in AAPC—which concluded the government-debt exception in Section 227(b)(1)(A)(iii) is an unconstitutional content-based speech restriction—makes the alleged violations unenforceable in federal court because the provision was determined to be unconstitutional. In response, the plaintiffs argued that because the Supreme Court’s decision preserved the general ban on robocalls to cellphones by severing “the new-fangled government-debt exception,” the Supreme Court “confirmed that [Section] 227(b)(1)(A)(iii) was constitutional all along.”
The district court disagreed with the plaintiffs, concluding that during the years that Section 227(b)(1)(A)(iii) permitted robocalls for government-debt collection while prohibiting other categories of robocalls, the entirety of the provision was unconstitutional. The district court noted that the Supreme Court’s opinion in AAPC provided little guidance, only “dicta of no precedential force.” The court looked to Justice Gorsuch’s opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, noting his reasoning was better “as a matter of law and logic.” Because the entirety of Section 227(b)(1)(A)(iii) was unconstitutional prior to the Supreme Court’s severance of the government-debt exception on July 6, the district court dismissed the action with respect to the alleged TCPA violations that occurred prior to that date, but denied dismissal for the one robocall made after July 6. Lastly, the court granted a stay of the action pending the Supreme Court’s decision in Duguid v. Facebook, Inc (covered by InfoBytes here and here).