Opinion ID: 450679
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Relationship Between Ripeness and Timeliness

Text: 19 As an initial matter, we think that the petitioners confound the obligations of the court with those of the petitioner. It is the duty of the court to make the prudential judgment whether a challenge to agency action is ripe; it is the responsibility of petitioners to file for review within the period set by Congress. While it is true that in extraordinary circumstances we have forgiven a petitioner's failure to file a timely petition, we have never suggested that petitioners may safely substitute their own notions of timely review for those of Congress. To the contrary, we have previously admonished petitioners of the wisdom of filing protective petitions for review during the statutory period, 36 and we do so again now. Diamond Shamrock, 37 so heavily relied upon by petitioners, is inapposite. In that case we simply upheld the District Court's decision that a complaint seeking review of some effluent limitation regulations issued by the EPA was not yet ripe. The court did not consider the relationship between ripeness and timeliness at all. 20 Considering that relationship here, we think it certainly is not the one implied by the petitioners--a rather casual means of circumventing timely filing requirements. Ripeness is concerned primarily with the institutional relationships between courts and agencies, and the competence of the courts to resolve disputes without further administrative refinement of the issues. 38 It is largely a prudential doctrine, whose basic rationale, as the Supreme Court explained in the landmark decision, Abbott Laboratories v. Gardner, is to prevent the courts, through avoidance of premature adjudication, from entangling themselves in abstract disagreements over administrative policies, and also to protect the agencies from judicial interference until an administrative decision has been formalized and its effects felt in a concrete way by the challenging parties. 39 Timeliness requirements, on the other hand, are designed to protect a different set of interests. They are intended to prevent courts from entangling themselves in disputes which Congress has determined have been raised too late and to protect agencies from endless judicial interference with formalized administrative policy. 40 21 Because the principal function of the ripeness doctrine is to aid a court in ascertaining whether it should stay its hand until agency policy has crystallized, most of the case law explicating the doctrine is forward-looking, that is, looking into the future to determine the effects of deferring review. 41 Only rarely does case law depict the ripeness doctrine in the service of a tardy petitioner--looking backward to divine whether the court would have considered the request for review ripe had it been brought in a timely fashion. Indeed, we know of only one case from this circuit, Geller v. FCC, 42 where we explicitly evaluated the retrospective ripeness of an untimely challenge. 43 There the petitioner solicited review of an FCC regulation nearly five years after the statutory review period had expired. We dismissed all of Geller's claims for lack of timeliness, except one which had clearly just become ripe with the passage of new legislation. 44 22 We think Geller may suggest one of two kinds of cases where the court should perform a retrospective ripeness analysis for a petitioner who has failed to file a timely request for review. The Geller type can be characterized as a case in which events occur or information becomes available after the statutory review period expires that essentially create a challenge that did not previously exist. 45 The other type involves claims that, under our precedents, are without any doubt not ripe for review during the statutory period. For example, Diamond Shamrock held that certain effluent limitation regulations promulgated under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA) 46 were not ripe for review until applied in discharge permit proceedings. 47 Obviously, other would-be petitioners in the same position as those in Diamond Shamrock --applicants for discharge permits under the same statute--can rely on the holding in that case. 23 As a general proposition, however, if there is any doubt about the ripeness of a claim, petitioners must bring their challenge in a timely fashion or risk being barred. Courts simply are not well-suited to answering hypothetical questions which involve guessing what the court might have done in the past. Furthermore, if we were routinely to conduct retrospective ripeness analyses where a late petitioner offers no compelling justification for not having filed his claim in a timely manner, we would wreak havoc with the congressional intention that repose be brought to final agency action. Consequently, except where events occur or information becomes available after the statutory review period expires that essentially create a challenge that did not previously exist, or where a petitioner's claim is, under our precedents, indisputably not ripe until the agency takes further action, we will be very reluctant, in order to save a late petitioner from the strictures of a timeliness requirement, to engage in a retrospective determination of whether we would have held the claim ripe had it been brought on time. 24 We do not believe that the instant case falls into either the Geller or clear precedent exceptions. It is not a Geller case because no events occurred after the statutory period that gave rise to an essentially new claim. Where, as in this case, the petitioner has notice during the review period that the regulation pertains to him, 48 the mere fact that the rule is applied to the petitioner after the statutory period expires will normally not be sufficient to bring a case into the Geller category. The delayed application of the rule may be relevant, however, to the clear precedent category. For example, as we noted above, other petitioners in Diamond Shamrock's position could rely on our holding that the regulations at issue in that case were not ripe until applied. 25 The petitioners argue that Diamond Shamrock also governs the ripeness issue presented by this case. We disagree. Diamond Shamrock involved pre-enforcement review by the District Court of regulations that would have been directly reviewable in this court under the review provision of the FWPCA upon the application of the regulations to the petitioner in a permit proceeding. 49 There, the court explicitly found that both the agency and the court would benefit from deferring judicial consideration until review under the organic statute was available. 50 By contrast, review here is sought under CERCLA's review provision, which expresses a congressional intent that review of regulations immediately follow promulgation and that it not take place at the enforcement stage. Furthermore, as we explain more fully in the succeeding section of this opinion, we find that both the EPA and the court would have benefitted from conducting the requested review of the HRS within the statutory period. Thus, Diamond Shamrock is in no way dispositive of the instant case. 51 26 Generally, if we determine that a petitioner's request for a retrospective ripeness evaluation does not fit into either the Geller or the clear precedent categories we will refuse to examine the petitioner's untimely claim to ascertain whether we would have found it ripe for adjudication had it been brought within the statutory period, unless our refusal to do so would cause a serious injustice to the petitioner. However, because we clearly articulate this policy for the first time in this case, we pause to demonstrate that the petitioners' challenge to the HRS was ripe during the review period.