Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-1008_1b82.pdf
Page Number: 17.0

12 

CORNER POST, INC. v. BOARD OF GOVERNORS, FRS 

Opinion of the Court 

focused  specific  review  provisions—flouting  Rotkiske’s  ad-
monition  to  heed  such  distinctions.    According  to  the  dis-
sent, we cannot expect “Congress to have explicitly stated 
that accrual in §2401(a) starts at the point of final agency
action when §2401(a) is a residual provision” that applies
generally.  Post, at 15.  But §2401(a)’s text reflects a choice:
Congress took the Little Tucker Act’s plaintiff-focused lim-
itations  period—which  began  when  “the  right  accrued  for
which the claim is made,” 36 Stat. 1093—and made it gen-
erally applicable to “every” suit against the United States,
§2401(a); see Part III, supra.  Congress could have created
a separate residual provision for suits challenging agency 
action and pegged its limitations period to the moment of
finality,  using  statutes  like  the  Emergency  Price  Control 
Act as a model.  It chose a different path.

Undeterred, the dissent insists that by the time §2401(a) 
was enacted, Congress had “uniformly expressed [a] judg-
ment” that the limitations period for agency suits should be 
defendant-centric  and  start  with  finality.  Post,  at  14. 
Again, this argument disregards §2401(a)’s text in favor of
alleged  congressional  intent  divined  from  other  statutes 
with very different language.  “As this Court has repeatedly
stated, the text of a law controls over purported legislative
intentions  unmoored  from  any  statutory  text”;  the  Court 
“may not ‘replace the actual text with speculation as to Con-
gress’ intent.’ ”  Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, 597 U. S. 629, 
642 (2022) (quoting Magwood  v. Patterson, 561 U. S. 320, 
334 (2010)).

In  any  event,  the  dissent  misunderstands  the  history. 
See post, at 14, and n. 6.  (Notably, the Board itself does not 
make this argument.)  While the Emergency Price Control 
Act of 1942 preceded the APA (1946) and §2401(a) (1948), 
most finality-focused limitations provisions, like the Hobbs 
Act (1950), came later.  See post, at 12–13, and n. 5; e.g., 5 
U. S. C. §7703(b)(1) (added by 92 Stat. 1143 (1978)).  To con-
jure its supposed backdrop, the dissent cites a hodgepodge