Corner Post, Inc. v. Board Of Governors Of The Federal Reserve System

144 S.Ct. 2440 (2024)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

P is a truck stop and convenience store. P accepts debit cards as a form of payment. While convenient for customers, debit cards are costly for merchants: Every transaction requires them to pay an “interchange fee” to the bank that issued the card. The amount of the fee is set by the payment networks, like Visa and Mastercard, that process the transaction between the banks of merchants and cardholders. The cost quickly adds up. P has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in interchange fees-which has meant higher prices for its customers. The Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 tasks the Federal Reserve Board with setting “standards for assessing whether the amount of any interchange transaction fee . . . is reasonable and proportional to the cost incurred by the issuer with respect to the transaction.” The Board promulgated Regulation II, which sets a maximum interchange fee of $0.21 per transaction plus .05% of the transaction’s value. The Board published the rule on July 20, 2011. Four months later, a group of retail-industry trade associations and individual retailers sued the Board, arguing that Regulation II allows costs that the statute does not. P did not exist when the Board adopted Regulation II or even during the D. C. Circuit litigation. In 2021, P joined a suit brought against the Board under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The complaint alleges that Regulation II is unlawful because it allows payment networks to charge higher fees than the statute permits. The District Court dismissed the suit as barred by 28 U. S. C. §2401(a), the applicable statute of limitations, and the Eighth Circuit affirmed. The Circuit held that “when plaintiffs bring a facial challenge to a final agency action, the right of action accrues, and the limitations period begins to run, upon publication of the regulation.” At least six Circuits now hold that the limitations period for “facial” APA challenges begins on the date of final agency action-e.g. when the rule was promulgated-regardless of when the plaintiff was injured. The Sixth Circuit has stated a generally applicable rule that §2401(a)’s limitations period begins when the plaintiff is injured by agency action, even if that injury did not occur until many years after the action became final.