TRW Inc. v. Andrews
The Supreme Court ruled that the two-year deadline for suing a credit reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act generally starts running when the violation happens, not when the consumer later discovers it. The Court held that a special discovery-based deadline written into the law for one narrow situation could not be stretched to cover every case.
The decision means a woman whose identity was stolen and misused to apply for credit lost part of her lawsuit against the credit bureau because she sued more than two years after some of the improper disclosures occurred, even though she did not learn about them until later.
“We are not at liberty to make Congress' explicit exception the general rule as well.”
The Court's core reason for rejecting a general discovery rule under the credit reporting law.
How it got here: A federal trial court ruled some of the woman's claims were time-barred; the Ninth Circuit reversed, holding a discovery rule applied; the credit bureau asked the Supreme Court to resolve a circuit split.
The Case in Depth
What happened
An identity thief obtained a woman's Social Security number from a medical office and used it, along with her own name, to apply for credit in several places. A credit reporting agency matched enough details to release the woman's credit file to those seeking credit, wrongly linking the thief's applications to her. She did not learn of this until more than a year later, and when she sued, some of the disclosures had occurred over two years earlier.
The question before the Court
Under a federal law protecting credit report accuracy, does the two-year deadline to sue a credit bureau start ticking only once a consumer discovers the problem, or automatically when the violation happens?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that the Fair Credit Reporting Act's two-year deadline generally starts running when the violation itself occurs, not when the consumer later discovers it. Congress wrote in one specific exception — for cases where a credit agency willfully lied about information it was legally required to disclose — and the Court refused to expand that narrow exception into a general rule covering all violations.
Because the woman's claims were based on improper disclosures rather than a willful lie about required information, the ordinary two-year clock applied. That meant her claims over disclosures made more than two years before she sued were time-barred, even though she did not learn about them until later.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Consumers who don't immediately learn that a credit bureau mishandled their information may permanently lose the right to sue over older violations, even if the harm wasn't discovered until much later. Credit reporting agencies gain more certainty that stale claims about older disclosures will be barred, unless the agency itself lied about what it disclosed.
What changes now
The case returns to the lower courts, where claims based on disclosures made more than two years before the lawsuit was filed are barred, while claims within the two-year window may proceed. This is a final ruling on the legal question of when the statute of limitations begins to run, though it does not resolve every remaining factual dispute in the underlying case.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether a different reading of when 'liability arises' under the statute — an argument raised for the first time before the Supreme Court — might affect the timing analysis, since that argument was not raised in the lower courts and the Court declined to address it.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Scalia
Justice Scalia agreed with the outcome but rejected the majority's refusal to say whether a general discovery rule applies to federal statutes of limitations at all. He argued the traditional rule is that a limitations period begins when the cause of action is complete, regardless of discovery, except in narrow historical exceptions for fraud and one case involving latent disease. He criticized the majority for leaving the broader question unresolved, saying that ambiguity casts doubt on countless other limitations periods.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court examined whether federal statutes of limitations generally include an unwritten 'discovery rule' — a principle that the clock starts only once the injured person learns of the violation — when the statute is silent on the point, and concluded no such automatic presumption exists outside narrow contexts like fraud, latent disease, and medical malpractice.
- The Court applied the interpretive canon that when Congress writes a specific exception into a statute, courts should not read in additional, broader exceptions Congress did not include — sometimes phrased as 'expressing one thing excludes others.'
- Because Congress wrote a discovery-based exception only for willful misrepresentation of legally required disclosures, the Court reasoned that Congress deliberately chose not to apply a discovery rule to ordinary violations under the same statute.
- The Court found that reading in a general discovery rule would make the narrow, explicitly written exception pointless in almost every real-world case, since the same facts that trigger a general discovery rule would also trigger the specific exception, and courts should avoid interpretations that render statutory language meaningless.
- The Court rejected the consumer's proposed reading that a general discovery rule and the specific written exception could coexist without duplicating each other, finding the scenarios offered to support that theory unrealistic.
- The Court declined to resolve a separate late-raised argument about when 'liability' technically comes into existence under the statute, because that argument had not been raised in the lower courts.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Holmberg v. Armbrecht (327 U.S. 392)
The Court said this case only established a fraud-based tolling exception, not a general discovery rule for all statutes.
Reaffirms Duncan v. Walker (533 U.S. 167)
The Court relied on this case's rule against reading statutory language as superfluous.