Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp. v. Bonjorno
The Court ruled that interest on a money judgment starts running from the date the judgment is formally entered, not from an earlier jury verdict or from an earlier judgment that was later thrown out for lacking evidentiary support.
The Court also held that the interest rate is locked in as of the judgment date, so a company that lost a long-running antitrust case had to pay interest at the older, lower rate rather than a higher rate Congress adopted while the case was still on appeal.
“In light of the plain language and the absence of legislative intent to the contrary, we conclude that postjudgment interest properly runs from the date of the entry of judgment.”
The Court's core holding on when postjudgment interest begins to accrue.
How it got here: After multiple trials and appeals over more than a decade, the Third Circuit ruled for the plaintiffs on damages and on which interest law applied; Kaiser and Bonjorno both asked the Supreme Court to review the interest rulings.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Bonjorno, the former owners of an aluminum drainage pipe company, sued Kaiser Aluminum for illegally monopolizing the pipe market in violation of federal antitrust law. After years of trials, retrials, and appeals produced a final damages award, the parties disagreed about how far back interest on that award should be calculated and which version of the federal interest-rate law should apply, since Congress changed the law while the case was still pending.
The question before the Court
Should interest on a company's court judgment start piling up from the date of the jury's verdict or the date of the actual judgment, and at the old interest rate or the new, higher one Congress passed while the case was still being appealed?
Why it matters
Litigants and their lawyers now have a clear, predictable rule for calculating how much interest accumulates on a judgment while a case winds through years of appeals. Because the rate locks in on the judgment date, parties can more confidently estimate the cost of prolonging litigation, though it also means a losing party sued years earlier may pay a lower rate than current law provides.
What changes now
The case is sent back to the lower courts to recalculate interest starting from December 4, 1981 (the date of the corrected judgment) using the interest rate set by the older version of the federal statute. This is a final merits ruling on the interest-calculation questions, though it leaves open how courts should handle other fact patterns, such as judgments corrected on appeal in different ways.
What this does not decide
The Court's ruling is limited to the specific calculation dispute before it. It does not decide what date would apply if a party had successfully appealed an order granting a new trial, nor does it set a rule for other common scenarios, like judgments where damages are apportioned incorrectly among parties or later reduced on remand.
Concurrences and dissents
How the Justices voted
Majority (1). Justice Connor (author).
Separate writings (1). Justice Scalia (author of a concurrence).
Concurrence — Justice Scalia
Justice Scalia agreed with the outcome but thought the majority didn't need to rely on the statute's specific wording to reach it. He argued the Court should have gone further and resolved the tension between two conflicting lines of cases—one presuming new laws apply retroactively unless unjust, another presuming laws apply only prospectively unless Congress says otherwise—by reaffirming that legislation should always be treated as prospective absent clear contrary intent, calling the retroactivity-friendly line of cases mistaken from the start. Read the full concurrence →
Dissent — Justice White
“This was precisely the result that Congress intended to prevent by amending § 1961.”White's objection that the ruling let a losing defendant avoid the higher interest rate Congress designed to discourage delay.
Justice White argued the newer, higher interest rate should have applied because the litigation was still ongoing when Congress changed the law, and the company's expectations about its interest liability were never truly fixed while appeals remained possible. He contended the majority's reading undermined Congress's purpose in raising the rate, which was to remove the financial incentive for losing parties to draw out appeals, and that applying the old rate let an adjudicated antitrust violator benefit from delay.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began with the statutory text: both the old and amended versions of the postjudgment interest law tie interest to 'the date of the entry of judgment,' a fixed, calculable date, and never mention the date of a jury's verdict.
- Because the statutory language was plain and no legislative history suggested otherwise, the Court held interest could not run from the verdict date, even though this meant the winning party bears any delay between the verdict and the judgment.
- The Court also held that interest could not be calculated from an earlier 1979 judgment that had been thrown out as unsupported by the evidence, reasoning that damages are only meaningfully fixed once a valid judgment establishes them.
- Turning to which version of the interest-rate law applied, the Court weighed two competing approaches: one from Bradley v. Richmond School Bd., which presumes a court applies the law in effect when it decides a case unless that would be unjust or contradict Congress's intent, and one from Bowen v. Georgetown University Hospital, which presumes new statutes apply only going forward unless Congress said otherwise.
- Rather than choosing between the two approaches, the Court found that under either one, clear congressional intent controls, and reasoned that because the rate itself is tied to financial conditions 'immediately prior to the date of the judgment,' Congress meant the rate to be fixed once and for all on that date.
- Applying that reasoning, because the judgment in this case was entered before the amended interest law took effect, the Court held that only the interest rate available under the earlier, lower-rate law could apply.