Cases involve wage laws, a telecommunications firm, a mail and wire fraud case, and chip manufacturing giant Nvidia.
The Supreme Court this week added four new cases to their docket for the 2024 and 2025 term, according to a list of orders from nine justices’ most recent private conference.
The Supreme Court will hear these four cases in its next term, which starts in October 2024 and will likely end sometime in June of next year.
The justices agreed to decide how difficult it should be for employers to prove in court that their workers qualify for exemptions from overtime pay and other legal protections granted by U.S. wage laws. They granted a petition in the
case, EMD Sales v. Carrera, from grocery distributor EMD Sales to appeal a lower court decision that imposed a higher bar on the company to show that sales representatives were exempt from overtime pay than any other appeals court has imposed in a similar case.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, citing three decades of its own precedent,
ruled in July 2023 that proving workers are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires “clear and convincing evidence.” The six other courts to rule on the issue have required only “a mere preponderance of the evidence,” which is the typical standard in civil litigation.
Notably, the Biden administration filed a separate
brief that argued that the 4th Circuit was so clearly wrong that the U.S. Supreme Court should summarily reverse the decision without granting review.
The justices agreed to take up
Wisconsin Bell v. U.S., which will determine whether reimbursement requests submitted to the Federal Communications Commission’s E-rate program can be considered claims
under the False Claims Act. Wisconsin Bell, a subsidiary of AT&T, is challenging a lawsuit filed under the False Claims Act that alleged the company defrauded the FCC program.
The lawsuit alleged the telecommunications firm overcharged libraries and schools for its services. A realtor, Todd Heath, claimed that it “charged schools and libraries more than was allowed under the program, causing the federal government to pay more than it should have,” according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.
The justices agreed to take up another
petition, Kousisis v. United States, which involves a criminal mail and wire fraud case that will evaluate when the Department of Justice can prosecute individuals who did not defraud any entity out of property or money.
In the case, Stamatios “Tom” Kousisis and other defendants are
appealing a 2019
sentence and conviction over a multi-million dollar fraud scheme that was allegedly carried out against the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. The defendants had pushed back against prosecutors’ claims in multiple appeals.
“The Court should respond with alacrity to reinforce—yet again—the narrow bounds of text, structure, and history in the mail and wire fraud statutes,” they wrote in a petition submitted to the Supreme Court earlier this year.
Another fraud case was taken up by the Supreme Court this week to
review Nvidia Corp v. E. Ohman J., which involves the chip manufacturing giant Nvidia. A class-action lawsuit that was originally filed in 2018 by investors had accused Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang of making public comments that went against internal company data and reports about whether its chips were involved in the cryptocurrency industry.
Nvidia and Mr. Huang are aiming to quash the lawsuit,
arguing in a Supreme Court petition that the complaint lacks enough details to move forward. A lower court had revived the lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages from the company.
The plaintiffs accused Nvidia of violating the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934 after company officials made statements in 2017 and 2018 that they said falsely downplayed how much of the company’s revenue was derived from cryptocurrency mining and purchases.
U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr. dismissed the lawsuit in 2021 but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2–1 ruling subsequently revived it. The 9th Circuit found that the plaintiffs had adequately alleged that Mr. Huang made “false or misleading statements and did so knowingly or recklessly,” allowing their case to proceed.
In the petition, Nvidia and Mr. Huang accused the investors of filing “abusive and speculative litigation” and argued that the 9th Circuit allowed the plaintiffs to “proceed to discovery based on ‘facts’ manufactured by an expert—rather than particularized allegations by [the] plaintiffs.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
