Student’s Note Influenced a Supreme Court Case Eight Years Later

When John Kendrick ’16 sat down to pen a research paper as a student at the University of Virginia School of Law eight years ago, he thought he was identifying an important question for the U.S. Supreme Court to address.

“The last paragraph of my note says something like, ‘Hopefully this can be used as a blueprint for future briefs, and perhaps that will lead to Supreme Court review and victory,’” he said. “I wasn’t optimistic that would actually happen, but it did.”

On July 1, the justices answered, issuing a 6-3 opinion in Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a ruling that may have been inspired in part by his paper. The decision clarified how long citizens have to sue federal agencies if they believe the agency’s actions harmed them.

Through his 2017 note for the Virginia Law Review, “(Un)limiting Administrative Review: Wind River, Section 2401(A), and the Right to Challenge Federal Agencies,” Kendrick became an expert on the topic of the timeline for suing federal agencies. He served as an amicus curiae in the case’s certiorari stage, submitting a brief in an advisory role when the court was deciding whether to review the case. Once the Supreme Court granted cert, he also filed a brief on the merits of the case, explaining to the Supreme Court how and why the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision was flawed.

To see the question he posed years ago finally conclude “was an incredibly surreal experience,” Kendrick said.

A Consequential Note

In order to fulfill the Law School writing requirement, Kendrick sat down with Professor John Duffy in his final year of law school to sift through potential topics for a paper he hoped to publish as a note in the Virginia Law Review, where Kendrick served as an articles editor. Duffy, an administrative law and intellectual property expert, advised Kendrick to choose a niche subject in which he would have a comparative advantage as a law student.

“It’s highly unlikely that a law student is going to come up with something novel to say about, for example, the commerce clause,” Kendrick explained. “You have to find something you can become an expert in by digging through primary sources in a way that hasn’t been done before.”

Duffy had flagged the issue that became the heart of Corner Post as something that seemed a bit odd to him, and felt it would work for Kendrick’s note because no one had previously considered it in depth.

Kendrick’s note examines the statute of limitations — the time frame for which legal proceedings can be initiated after an alleged legal violation — for Administrative Procedure Act claims. Prior to the July 1 ruling, in many circuits certain APA claims had to be brought within six years of the agency’s action, rather than six years from when the person was harmed by the agency.

In Corner Post, the namesake North Dakota truck stop sued the Federal Reserve over a regulation on debit card swipe fees that was put into effect in 2011. According to past understandings of the statute of limitations, the deadline for lawsuits over the regulation was in 2017, but Corner Post didn’t open its doors until 2018.

“This seemed out of step with how the word ‘accrue’ is interpreted in almost every other [similar] statute of limitations; typically statutes of limitations are interpreted to run from the time the person is harmed,” Kendrick explained.

The Supreme Court agreed: The six-year limitations period did not begin to run against Corner Post until it opened its doors in 2018, and therefore its claim — filed in 2021 — was timely.

Kendrick’s student note analyzed the meaning of the relevant limitations period through the lens of various primary sources, including court opinions and treatises interpreting similar limitations periods for well over a hundred years. His note also considered how the limitations period had been interpreted for non-APA claims, and various policy arguments for and against his interpretation.

Duffy said Kendrick’s note was most likely to have influenced the Supreme Court in the decision to hear the case.

“The fact that someone wrote significant scholarship on the statute of limitations for APA claims — and detailed the conflicting views and weaknesses of the dominant view in the lower courts, and did so years before the case rose to the court — tells the court that this issue has been percolating for years,” Duffy said. “That’s a huge sign that it’s significant and it’s not going to go away.”

The Supreme Court receives 7,000-8,000 cert petitions each year; it agreed to hear only 62 cases in the 2023 term. Duffy was pleasantly surprised to see the issue picked up by the Supreme Court, but not that Kendrick had a hand in it.

“He’s got an excellent legal mind,” Duffy said.

An Expert on the Issue

A Northern Virginia native, Kendrick said he chose UVA for its collegiality and relative ideological balance. He was involved with the Federalist Society and the Innocence Project while on North Grounds.

He now works as an antitrust lawyer in D.C. and enjoys biking with his children and cheering on the Washington Commanders and Capitals.

After Kendrick’s student note was published, several lawyers working on similar cases reached out to him.

“They were encountering this issue and saying, ‘This is crazy. There’s got to be someone who’s addressed this,’” Kendrick said. “The issue was starting to percolate a bit.”

He was glad to see the issue gain traction, and that the court adopted his reasoning.

“The [SCOTUS opinion] corrected a doctrine that just didn’t make any sense,” he said. “It wasn’t right as a matter of textual interpretation or policy, and it didn’t comport with basic fairness or the structure of administrative review in this country.”

Duffy predicted that the public may see more activity in this area, either through further litigation or by way of certain subsidiary issues that were noted in the majority opinion and left unresolved.

“The Supreme Court decision is just one piece of the puzzle. One issue has been resolved, but many others remain — something to discuss in the courts and in Congress. The ball is in their court now,” he said.