Patchak v. Zinke
The Court upheld a law Congress passed specifically to end a landowner's lawsuit challenging a Native American tribe's casino land, ruling that stripping federal courts of jurisdiction over the case did not violate the separation of powers.
The decision confirms that Congress can pass targeted, retroactive laws that decide the fate of a single pending lawsuit, so long as it does so by changing the law that applies rather than ordering a particular winner directly -- a distinction three justices in dissent said was no real distinction at all.
How it got here: After the Supreme Court let Patchak's suit proceed in 2012, Congress passed a law targeting it; the District Court and D.C. Circuit dismissed the suit, and Patchak sought Supreme Court review.
The Case in Depth
What happened
David Patchak, a landowner near a proposed casino site in Michigan, sued the Secretary of the Interior for taking a 147-acre parcel into trust for the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians, arguing the tribe wasn't eligible under a federal land-into-trust law. After Patchak won the right to proceed at the Supreme Court once already, Congress passed a law specifically declaring that lawsuits over that land "shall not be filed or maintained" in federal court and "shall be promptly dismissed."
The question before the Court
Could Congress pass a law ordering federal courts to dismiss one specific pending lawsuit over a tribe's casino land, without stepping into the courts' own constitutional turf?
Why it matters
The ruling lets Congress pass narrow, even single-case-targeted statutes that strip federal courts of the power to hear specific lawsuits, as long as the law is framed as a jurisdictional or immunity change rather than a direct order. That gives Congress a practical tool to shut down litigation -- here, protecting a tribe's casino -- that critics warn could let lawmakers pick winners in pending cases the courts would otherwise decide.
What changes now
This is a final merits decision, not a temporary order. Patchak's lawsuit remains dismissed, and the tribe's casino land keeps its trust status. The ruling stands as guidance for how far Congress can go in passing narrow, retroactive laws aimed at specific pending lawsuits, though the justices remained split on the exact theory -- jurisdiction-stripping versus restored sovereign immunity -- for why such laws are constitutional.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the law violates other constitutional limits, like the ban on bills of attainder or ex post facto laws, since only the Article III argument was before it. The justices also disagreed among themselves on the exact legal theory (jurisdiction-stripping versus restored sovereign immunity), so no single rationale commands a majority.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Breyer
Justice Breyer joined the plurality but wrote separately to stress that this was not simply a law declaring a winner. He read the Gun Lake Act's two parts together: the first ratified the land's trust status (which Patchak never challenged as unconstitutional), and the second jurisdictional part merely supplemented that ratification without altering unchallenged action, which he found unobjectionable.
Concurrence — Justice Ginsburg
Justice Ginsburg would have decided the case on narrower grounds: that Congress simply withdrew the government's earlier consent to be sued over the Bradley Property, restoring its sovereign immunity, which Congress may do at any time even for pending cases. She saw no need to reach the broader jurisdiction-stripping and Article III questions the plurality addressed.
Concurrence — Justice Sotomayor
Justice Sotomayor agreed with the dissent that Congress cannot use jurisdiction-stripping to achieve what it could not order directly, and that a law targeting a single lawsuit should be viewed with great skepticism. She concurred in the judgment only because she read the Gun Lake Act as restoring sovereign immunity rather than stripping jurisdiction, avoiding the separation-of-powers problem entirely.
Dissent — Justice Roberts
“Article III of the Constitution vests that responsibility in the Judiciary alone.”The dissent's opening objection that only courts, not Congress, may decide the outcome of a pending case.
Chief Justice Roberts argued that Congress had done exactly what it cannot do: pick a winner in one specific pending lawsuit and dress it up as a jurisdictional rule. He stressed that no other lawsuits over the property existed or could be filed, so the law's broad 'relating to' language was a fiction covering a law aimed at Patchak alone, leaving courts no real adjudicative role and crossing the line into judicial power.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The plurality applied a long-standing line: Congress crosses into the judicial branch's exclusive territory only when it orders a specific result under the old law, but not when it genuinely changes the law that courts must then apply -- even if the new law guarantees one side wins.
- The plurality read the Gun Lake Act's no-claims provision as a jurisdiction-stripping statute -- a law taking away federal courts' power to hear a category of cases -- because it used mandatory, no-exceptions language and overrode the normal grant of federal-court jurisdiction.
- Because Congress has long had broad, 'plenary' authority to define and limit what cases federal courts may hear, the plurality treated stripping jurisdiction as an ordinary legislative power, not judicial power, relying on a 19th-century precedent allowing Congress to cut off appellate jurisdiction over a class of cases.
- The plurality distinguished this case from United States v. Klein, an 1872 decision striking down a law that tried to dictate an outcome by locking in a rule Congress had no power to set (about what a presidential pardon proves) -- here, by contrast, Congress had full authority over the underlying question of trust status, and the law applied broadly to every suit 'relating to' the property, not just Patchak's.
- The plurality also rejected the argument that the law improperly reopened the Court's earlier ruling that Patchak's suit 'may proceed,' concluding that ruling only cleared preliminary defenses and never finally resolved the case, so Congress remained free to change the governing law while it was still pending.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes United States v. Klein (13 Wall. 128)
The Court said Klein struck down a law usurping the pardon power, unlike this broadly applicable jurisdiction-stripping statute.
Reaffirms Ex parte McCardle (7 Wall. 506)
The Court relied on this case as continuing authority that Congress may strip federal court jurisdiction over a class of cases.
Reaffirms Bank Markazi v. Peterson
The Court applied this case's rule that Congress may pass outcome-altering laws for pending cases if it changes the law itself.