Source: http://www.williamgoren.com/blog/tag/exclusive-jurisdiction/
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 21:50:12+00:00

Document:
For you baseball fans out there, yesterday was a big day. Both the NL Central and the NL West had a one game play in to decide whether they are going to be the division winner or the wildcard. I’m lucky because my native team, the Chicago Cubs, are assured of a playoff spot (wildcard it turns out). My hometown team, the Atlanta Braves, is a division winner. So, I have two teams in the hunt. If you have a team in the playoffs, good luck!
Today’s blog entry is a two-for-one. That is, we will be discussing two cases from the 11th Circuit that came down recently. One we have blogged on already here, and this is the appellate decision. The other is exhaustively analyzed by my colleague Richard Hunt in his blog entry, which can be found here. However, I do want to add a few words beyond what Richard says in his entry. As usual, the blog entry is divided into categories, and they are: court’s reasoning Sierra v. City of Hallandale Beach, Florida-exhaustion; court’s reasoning Sierra v. City of Hallandale Beach, Florida-primary jurisdiction; Sierra takeaways; Kennedy v. OmegaGas and Oil LLC; and Kennedy takeaways. Of course, the reader is free to focus on any or all of the categories.
Court’s Reasoning in Sierra v. City of Hallandale Beach, Florida-Exhaustion.
We discussed the lower court decision here. So, I refer you to that blog entry for a more complete recitation of the facts. Also, the 11th Circuit decision is published.
Before determining an administrative remedy bars federal court’s jurisdiction, there must be clear and unequivocal terms that the judiciary is barred from hearing an action until the administrative agency has come to a decision.
Plaintiff has not brought a complaint under the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA). Rather, the complaint was brought under the Rehabilitation Act and title II of the ADA.
Under the well pleaded complaint rule, a litigant gets to choose under what cause of action to sue.
Congress granted the Federal Communications Commission exclusive jurisdiction with respect to any complaint filed under the CVAA.
Issues concerning closed captioning of video content delivered over the Internet can arise in a variety of ways, including in the context of disability discrimination, while issues concerning complaints under the CVAA arise only in one place. In short, the relevant section of the CVAA does nothing more than prevent someone wanting to bring the complaint under that section from doing so anywhere else other than before the FCC. Both the Ninth Circuit and the District Court in Massachusetts, in a case we discussed here, have reached the same conclusions. Cases to the contrary are not persuasive.
Not all plaintiffs are able to sue under the Rehabilitation Act or the ADA.
Two factors are utilized for deciding whether primary jurisdiction is an appropriate doctrine to apply and they are: the expertise of the agency deferred to and the need for a uniform interpretation of a statute or regulation.
The FCC itself has indicated a plaintiff is not required to exhaust remedies under the CVAA. That indication comes in two different places. First, when they issued regulations in 1997, the FCC recognized that the statute operated in parallel to other federal statutes on the same subject. Second, the plaintiff in this case when he exhausted his administrative remedies with the FCC, received a reply from the FCC explicitly noting that he had ADA remedies apart from the CVAA.
Since the primary jurisdiction doctrine is prudential and not jurisdictional, the court saw no reason why deference to an agency is appropriate when the agency itself feels that no deference is warranted.
The FCC has no expertise on whether the Rehabilitation Act and the ADA recognizes a cause of action for failure to provide closed captioning.
The FCC’s charge under the CVAA has nothing to do with what constitutes a violation under the Rehabilitation Act or the ADA.
Courts do not automatically grant primary jurisdiction to an agency in interpreting its own statute, let alone a statute over which the agency has no authority.
The statutory interpretation task presented by this case presents no issue demanding the FCC’s expertise.
The case presents no special need for uniformity apart from the general search for uniformity that the law requires. That is, just because you may have divergent interpretation of the ADA and Rehabilitation Act, that does not defeat the statutes themselves.
One plaintiff benefiting from a more favorable interpretation of the Rehabilitation Act or the ADA will not benefit that plaintiff at some other plaintiff’s expense.
Just because it is possible that the plaintiff has filed a claim against the wrong party, that does not defeat the court’s jurisdiction to hear the case.
One of the things we have seen about this blog, is that many times the various laws bump into each other. This case is a reminder that the plaintiff gets to choose what laws to proceed under. There are a variety of reasons as to why a plaintiff chooses to proceed under one law or the other.
I am not exactly sure I understand the court’s reference that not all plaintiffs are able to sue under Rehabilitation Act or the ADA in the context that the statement arises in the opinion. It is, of course, a true statement especially where the plaintiff does not have a disability. However, if the plaintiff does have a disability and cannot meaningfully access the programs and activities of the public entity or the place of public accommodations, it would seem they could bring suit under the ADA or the Rehabilitation Act in many situations.
An important consideration here, is that the FCC explicitly noted that their jurisdiction over disability discrimination was not exclusive.
There is a difference between plaintiff benefiting from divergent interpretation of statutes v. a plaintiff benefiting at the expense of another plaintiff, which is the case in ratemaking situations.
Assuming a claim is filed against the wrong party, that doesn’t prevent the court from hearing the case in the first place.
This decision is not published.
For an analysis of this decision, you are not going to do better than Richard Hunt’s exhaustive analysis of this case, which can be found here.
This case should be read with my blog entry discussing how to defend against the serial plaintiff, the defense of which I have been involved with numerous times. That blog entry can be found here.
The decision is not published.
This decision should be used in conjunction with the case discussed in my defending against the serial plaintiff blog entry, which can be found here.
The critical piece of this decision is the court specifically saying that the plaintiff initial burden of production, “is not light.” So, this gives the defense the ability to use the two-step approach discussed in my defending against the serial plaintiff blog entry, and should it continue to go into litigation, then be able to buttress its decisions as to what to fix and when to fix them by forcing the plaintiff to present a significant amount of evidence that the defendant’s determination as to readily achievable is not correct.
I bet you didn’t know that in some circumstances title II and §504 may contain an exhaustion requirement. The reason I’m guessing you didn’t know is that until I saw this case, Sierra v. School Board of Broward County, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 62498 (S.D. Fla. April 20, 2017), it hadn’t occurred to me either. This week’s blog entry discusses this question in the entry is divided into the following categories: facts; court’s reasoning; City of Rancho Palos Verdes v. Abrams; application of City of Rancho Palos Verdes v. Abrams; and takeaways. The reader is free to focus on any or all of the categories.
Plaintiff alleged that the school board denied him, a deaf individual, access to their archived video for streaming on demand and live streaming of their school board meetings on the basis of his disability. Plaintiff, like myself, neither understands nor uses sign language. Therefore, he requires the use of auxiliary aids and services, such as closed captioning, in order to participate in and receive the benefit of the school board’s online videos. The school board provides a video streaming service through its online portal so that any person can watch its meetings in real time and listen to and participate in those legislative decision-making activities. However, as a result of plaintiff’s disability, he can’t observe and participate in those meetings because the streaming services do not provide any auxiliary aids or services for people with hearing disabilities who do not use sign language. In particular, the streaming service does not offer closed captioning. Plaintiff had the same problem with the school board’s social networking sites on Facebook and on Twitter. The meetings plaintiff wanted to participate in are also aired later via web streaming and on the district’s internal broadcast system. That same day, the meetings are also broadcast on a tape delay on WBEC-TV at 4 PM. The following morning, the televised broadcast is then archived online and made available for viewing on the school board’s website. The defendant defended on the grounds that the Telecommunications Act mandates that a plaintiff alleging disability discrimination in this situation must first go through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), before being able to file a claim of disability discrimination under title II of the ADA or under §504 the Rehabilitation Act.
In 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act in an effort to secure better access the video programming for the hearing impaired (it bears noting that in the disability rights community, the more sensitive term would be hard of hearing and not hearing impaired). That legislation directed the FCC to require closed captioning for video programming broadcast on television.
In 2010, Congress enacted the CVAA (21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010), which amended the Telecommunications Act and directed the FCC to modify it regulations so as to impose closed captioning requirement for certain video programming available over the Internet.
Effective April 30, 2012, the FCC implemented new regulations imposing closed captioning requirements on all nonexempt full-length video programming delivered using Internet protocol if the programming is published or exhibited on television in the United States with captions. Further, those regulations set forth provisions talking about how any complaints regarding same need to be filed with the Federal Communications Commission, what needs to be in that complaint, the process that occurs once that complaint is filed, and a statement that the FCC is vested with the exclusive jurisdiction with respect to any such complaints. 47 C.F.R. §79.4.
The CVAA is Congress’s most recent and specific pronouncement regarding the duties of broadcasters to caption their programming.
Mandating that a plaintiff first file his claim with the FCC accomplishes Congress’s goal of allowing the FCC, which has expertise in this area, the opportunity to address the extent to which a broadcaster must provide close captioning.
By enacting the legislation, Congress called upon the FCC’s expertise and vested the FCC with exclusive jurisdiction to address any complaints involving a video programmer’s compliance with the CVAA’s administrative remedy for pursuing any claim under the ADA or §505 (§504 remedies provision), of the Rehabilitation Act.
The existence of an administrative complaint procedure under the CVAA is entirely consistent with a private right of action under the ADA for the same wrong.
All the court is doing is delaying plaintiff’s prosecution of the claims until such time as the plaintiff has exhausted his administrative remedies under the CVAA thereby providing the FTC an opportunity to address those complaints. Once that process is completed, plaintiff is free to refile claims as necessary. In this way, the CVAA’s intended purpose is accomplished while preserving plaintiff’s rights under the ADA and §505 the Rehabilitation Act.
Whether Sierra holds up is going to come down to how the courts interpret United States Supreme Court case of City of Rancho Palos Verdes v. Abrams. In that case, a person decided to erect all kinds of communication towers on his land and drew considerable grief from the city for doing so. In fact, things got so bad that he filed a §1983 cause of action against the City. It went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. That decision is critical to understanding whether the case we are discussing today will hold up. In particular, the United States Supreme Court said the following in holding that a §1983 action would not fly.
The critical question is whether Congress intended for the remedies in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to coexist with an alternative remedy in a §1983 action.
Decisions saying that §1983 action are unavailable to remedy violations of federal statutory rights focus on the existence of a more restrictive remedy provided in the violated statute itself (emphasis added).
In all of the cases where the United States Supreme Court has held that §1983 is available for a violation of federal statute, it has emphasized that the statute (emphasis added), at issue did not provide a private judicial remedy or even, in many cases, a private administrative remedy for the rights violated.
Where §1983 remedies were held not to be available, the statute at issue themselves (emphasis added), provided for private judicial remedies thereby evidencing congressional intent to supplant §1983.
The ordinary inference that the remedy provided in the statute is exclusive can be overcome by express or implicit textual indication that the remedy complements rather than supplants §1983.
The statute’s text, structure, and history all provide convincing evidence that Congress intended the Telecommunications Act of 1996 with respect to the facts before it, operates as a comprehensive and exclusive remedial scheme. The statute’s structure appears fundamentally incompatible with the private remedy offered by §1983.
Since 1871, §1983 has stood as an independent safeguard against the deprivations of federal constitutional and statutory rights.
Only in an exceptional case, involving unusually comprehensive and exclusive statutory scheme, will the Supreme Court be likely to conclude that a given statute impliedly forecloses a §1983 remedy.
While the heavy burden was met in Sierra, there will be many instances where §1983 will be available even though Congress had not explicitly so provided in the text of the statute in question.
The majority opinion incorrectly assumes that legislative history of the statute is totally irrelevant. That assumption is contrary to nearly every case the Supreme Court had decided in this area of the law, all of which surveyed or at least acknowledged, the available legislative history or lack thereof.
47 U.S.C. §151, which establishes the Federal Communications Commission, doesn’t even have within it coverage of persons with disabilities. On the other hand, as we know, the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act are comprehensive schemes designed to redress disability discrimination throughout society and allow for integration of persons with disabilities into all aspects of society.
47 U.S.C. §152 says that the Act applies to all interstate and foreign communication by wire or radio and all interstate and foreign transmission of energy by radio originating or being received within the United States. This statute was last amended in 1993 just when the Internet was beginning to take off and certainly could not be intended to apply to the Sierra situation.
47 U.S.C. §613 mandates that the Federal Communications Commission come up with regulations dealing with close captioning and goes into elaborate detail as to the scope of those regulations. 47 U.S.C. §618 is the enforcement provisions. However, nothing in either statute talks about how the FCC has exclusive jurisdiction on such matters. The exclusive jurisdiction language, as far as I can tell after going through the Act, comes from the regulations at 47 C.F.R. §79.4(f) and not from the statute itself.
Since the exclusive jurisdiction language does not come from the statute itself, Chevron deference is not in order.
Since the exclusive jurisdiction language does not come from the statute itself, the CVAA per City of Rancho Palos Verdes does not require that claims under the ADA and §505 be exhausted through the FCC first.
I definitely look for Sierra, or cases decided like it, to go all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The next stop is the 11th Circuit, assuming an appeal. It will be interesting to see if a Circuit Court split develops. Cases like this have not reached the Circuit Court level yet.
A key person on this question, whenever it gets to the United States Supreme Court is going to be Justice Gorsuch. He is on record, as discussed here, as not being a fan of Chevron Also, as discussed in that blog entry, he is extremely literal about statutes. So, if the current makeup of the court stays the same on this particular issue, you may very well get a decision looking like 5-4 or considering the vibe from Fry and Endrew, 6-3 or even 7-2. Of course, this case is a long way from the United States Supreme Court and the makeup of the court may change before then. Keep in mind, plaintiffs with disabilities have fared very well at the United States Supreme Court in nonemployment matters, including prevailing three times this term.
For public entities not desirous of having their meetings streamed with close captioned, if they can get their meetings onto TV and get a court to buy off on Sierra, they can force a plaintiff to go through the FCC administrative process thereby delaying any ADA or Rehabilitation Act enforcement. Of course, that is a separate question from why a public entity would want to take this approach as dealing with the FCC would have to be a very expensive proposition.

References: v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 §504
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 §504
 §79
 §505
 §505
 v. 
 §1983
 §1983
 §1983
 §1983
 §1983
 §1983
 §1983
 §1983
 §1983
 §1983
 §1983
 §1983
 §151
 §152
 §613
 §618
 §79
 §505