Carr v. Saul
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Social Security disability claimants did not forfeit their right to challenge the unconstitutional appointment of the judges who heard their cases, even though they never raised that objection during the agency's own proceedings.
The decision resolves a split among the federal appeals courts and makes clear that claimants in non-adversarial agency proceedings are not penalized for failing to raise constitutional objections that the agency itself had no power to fix.
How it got here: Claimants raised their constitutional appointment challenges in federal court after finishing agency review; the Eighth and Tenth Circuits held the claims were forfeited; the Supreme Court took the case to resolve a circuit split.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Six people who applied for Social Security disability benefits between 2013 and 2015 had their claims denied by agency administrative law judges (ALJs). After they finished the agency review process, the Supreme Court ruled in a separate case that ALJs appointed by lower-level staff — rather than by agency heads — violated the Constitution's Appointments Clause. The Social Security ALJs who heard these six claimants' cases had been appointed the same unconstitutional way, but the claimants had not objected to this during their agency hearings.
The question before the Court
Did Social Security disability claimants give up their right to challenge their hearing judges' unconstitutional appointments by not raising that objection during the agency's own review process?
The Court's answer
No — the claimants did not forfeit their right to challenge the appointments of their Social Security ALJs by failing to raise that objection during agency proceedings.
When no statute or regulation requires a claimant to raise a specific issue before an agency in order to bring it later in federal court, courts decide whether to impose such a requirement by asking how closely the agency proceedings resemble adversarial litigation. Social Security ALJ hearings are fundamentally inquisitorial — the agency investigates for the claimant rather than acting as an opposing party, ALJs develop the record on their own, and claimants receive little notice that any argument must be raised or be lost forever. Two additional factors closed the door on a forfeiture rule for these particular constitutional challenges: ALJs have no expertise in deciding who is properly appointed to hold office, and requiring claimants to raise the objection before ALJs who were powerless to grant any remedy would have been a pointless exercise. Raising the challenge for the first time in federal court was therefore not untimely.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Disability claimants who lost their Social Security hearings before improperly appointed judges — and went to federal court without first raising that objection at the agency — can still pursue new hearings before constitutionally appointed judges. The ruling relieves a class of vulnerable claimants from a technical trap that had barred them from relief in some federal circuits.
What changes now
The cases are sent back to the Eighth and Tenth Circuits to allow the claimants to pursue their Appointments Clause challenges in federal court. Those claimants should receive new hearings before properly appointed ALJs. The ruling resolves the split between the circuits on this question. Claimants whose cases had fully concluded before any challenge was raised in court received no benefit, as the Social Security Administration's own remedial rule had already cut off that avenue.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly noted that its analysis could come out differently for routine objections to individual disability benefit decisions — as opposed to structural constitutional challenges. The ruling does not mean claimants in Social Security proceedings can freely skip raising any argument at the agency level and save it for federal court.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas agreed that Social Security ALJ proceedings are plainly nonadversarial — lawyers, briefs, and attendance are often optional, ALJs can raise issues on their own, and the process is built to help claimants rather than oppose them — and that this nonadversarial character is reason enough not to impose an exhaustion rule. He would have stopped the analysis there, without reaching the separate constitutional-claim and futility exceptions that the majority also relied upon.
Concurrence in part — Justice Breyer
Justice Breyer maintained his longstanding view, expressed in his Sims dissent, that claimants ordinarily must raise all relevant issues before Social Security ALJs and that the agency's nonadversarial character is generally no reason to excuse that requirement. He agreed, however, that Appointments Clause challenges fall within the well-established exceptions for constitutional claims and for claims that would be futile to raise before an agency that cannot grant any relief, and on that narrower ground he joined in the Court's judgment.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- When no statute or regulation imposes an issue-exhaustion rule — meaning a requirement that a claimant raise an argument before the agency or lose it — courts decide whether to create one by analogy to the rule that appellate courts won't hear arguments skipped at trial. That analogy only holds when the agency proceedings were genuinely adversarial, so the first question is how adversarial Social Security ALJ hearings really are.
- Starting from the baseline set by Sims v. Apfel (2000), the Court noted that Social Security proceedings are expressly designed to be 'informal' and 'nonadversarial': ALJs investigate for claimants rather than opposing them, the agency is obligated to consider all information in its records regardless of what the claimant raised, and regulations give claimants no notice that failing to raise an argument means losing it forever. The very features that distinguish these proceedings from courtroom litigation undercut the case for a forfeiture rule.
- Even granting that ALJ hearings are somewhat more adversarial than Appeals Council review — ALJs hold mandatory hearings, send claimants a list of issues beforehand, and require written objections to those issues — the Court held that the proceedings were still not adversarial enough to support a judicially created forfeiture rule, at least for the type of challenge at issue here.
- First, constitutional challenges to the structure of an agency — like whether the people running the hearings were validly appointed — fall outside ALJs' areas of expertise and are regularly entertained by courts even when not raised before the agency. ALJs are not equipped to evaluate whether their own appointments were constitutional.
- Second, the Court's long-recognized 'futility' exception applied: there were no properly appointed ALJs to whom objecting claimants' cases could be transferred, and ALJs could not reappoint themselves. Internal agency guidance confirmed this — SSA instructed its ALJs to tell claimants they 'did not have the authority to rule on' any Appointments Clause challenge. Requiring claimants to raise an objection that the agency had already told its judges to ignore would protect no legitimate interest.
- The government's fallback argument — that claimants raised their challenges too late under prior cases — failed because neither of the cases it cited (Ryder v. United States and Lucia v. SEC) addressed what counts as 'timely' in a non-adversarial agency review scheme like Social Security's. Where claimants are not required to exhaust an issue in administrative proceedings, raising it for the first time in federal court is, by definition, not untimely.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Sims v. Apfel (530 U.S. 103)
The Court extended Sims's reasoning that Social Security proceedings are nonadversarial from Appeals Council review to ALJ hearings.
Distinguishes United States v. L. A. Tucker Truck Lines, Inc. (344 U.S. 33)
Unlike Tucker Truck Lines, SSA claimants had no access to the one official who could remedy the appointment problem, so repetition of objections would have been futile.
Distinguishes Lucia
Lucia arose from SEC proceedings with a statutory exhaustion requirement and did not address what counts as a timely objection in the SSA's non-adversarial scheme.