A federal statute sets a sixty (60) day deadline for federal employees to appeal certain adverse employment actions taken against them. See 5 U.S.C. § 7703(b)(1)(A). In Harrow v. Dept. of Defense, decided on May 16, 2024, the Court unanimously ruled that that deadline is subject to “equitable” exceptions for late-filers that may be created by the courts.
COMMENT: In other cases, the Court has rightly recognized that not all filing deadlines set by statute are “jurisdictional” in nature. That is, not all filing deadlines deprive courts of “jurisdiction” to hear and decide a case when the person filing it misses the deadline. The Court has also rightly recognized, however, that a statutory filing deadline is “jurisdictional” in nature when the legislature enacting the deadline so intended. A “jurisdictional” deadline does deprive courts of jurisdiction to hear and decide cases in which the filing deadline has been missed.
In this case, the Court misapplied those rules. Here, a federal statute explicitly governing the “jurisdiction” of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, 28 U.S.C. § 1295, explicitly incorporated the statute that set the 60-day deadline for filing federal employee appeals. In the words of the latter statute, that court has “jurisdiction . . . of an appeal [from an adverse employment decision by the governmental agency that manages the government’s civil service program] pursuant to section[…] 7703(b)(1) . . . of title 5 . . . .”[1] That text leaves no room for judge-made exceptions to the 60-day filing deadline in 5 U.S.C. § 7703(b)(1).
The Justices may have thought that that deadline had been applied in an unfair or inequitable manner in this particular case, and they may be right about that (they reserved that issue for the administrative agency to decide). But the Justices, who are not elected by the people, have no power to superimpose their reservations about the fairness of a statute, or its operation as prescribed therein, duly enacted by an elected legislature.
Dan Rhea
[1] 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(9).
RECENT RULINGS 