Courts Disagree on Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Amendment, to go to SCOTUS natlawreview.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from natlawreview.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A surprising Supreme Court
When is a case about a pipeline about more than the pipeline? When it produces a 5-4 Supreme Court decision with a surprising mix of conservative and liberal Justices on both sides. Their opinions reflect disagreements from the founding era over the role and power of the federal government.
Pipeline developer PennEast has been seeking to build a 116-mile pipeline between Pennsylvania and New Jersey since 2014. The Natural Gas Act of 1938 delegates the federal governmentâs eminent domain power to private parties once the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) certifies a pipeline.
PennEast had negotiated the route with New Jersey politicians, but Gov. Phil Murphy pulled a switcheroo and invoked state sovereign immunity under the Eleventh Amendment to block the company from building on state-owned land. The Eleventh Amendment bars states from being sued in federal court by private citizens of other states. New Jersey argued that FERCâs emine
Editorial Roundup: U S kob.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kob.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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By a two to one vote, in an April 29 opinion, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed a decision of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia that a 2017 increase in U.S. Trustee’s fees violated the Uniformity Clause and the Bankruptcy Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In a dissenting opinion, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum, strongly stated his belief that the increase violated the Bankruptcy Clause, but agreed that the Uniformity Clause was not violated. All three judges on the Fourth Circuit panel agreed with the Bankruptcy Court that the increase applied to Chapter 11 cases that were already pending when the increase took effect, not only to cases filed after the increase went into effect.
The holidays came early for the United States Trustee (the “
U.S. Trustee”) on November, 3, 2020, when a three-judge panel of the United States Circuit Court for the Fifth Circuit, on direct appeal, reversed the bankruptcy court and upheld the constitutionality of a 2017 increase to quarterly fees payable to the U.S. Trustee in
Hobbs v. Buffets LLC (In re Buffets LLC), No. 19-50765, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 34866 (5th Cir. Nov. 3, 2020). Although the Fifth Circuit’s opinion addresses a variety of constitutional challenges to the recent increase to U.S. Trustee fees, the “the main event” was “whether [the] fee increase violates constitutional uniformity requirements.”