The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear Sprint...
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear Sprint Nextel’s appeal of an 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision holding that an access charge dispute between Sprint and Iowa Telecom, now Windstream Iowa, should first be heard in state rather…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
than federal court. Sprint refused to pay access charges for calls carried by Windstream on the grounds that they were transmitted over the Internet rather than the public switched telephone network. The case centers on different interpretation of the Younger doctrine and how it’s applied in the different circuits. A federal district judge decided that state proceedings should be resolved before federal review and the St. Louis-based appeals court agreed. “The Eighth Circuit’s decision ... 1) creates a stark split in the circuits in the application of federal abstention doctrine under Younger v. Harris ... ; and 2) also represents a sharp departure from this Court’s jurisprudence establishing the ‘primacy of the federal judiciary in deciding questions of federal law,'” Sprint said in seeking review (http://bit.ly/YKdAJf). “The basic purpose of Younger abstention is to ensure that the States may try criminal cases free from federal judicial interference with their legitimate enforcement interests. ... Because Younger protects the States’ enforcement interests, a key requirement for Younger abstention is that the state proceeding must be a criminal, disciplinary, or similar civil-enforcement proceeding -- or as some courts have summed up that requirement, the proceeding must be ‘coercive’ rather than ‘remedial.'” Sprint said the 8th Circuit “has now rejected that core principle of Younger, and requires abstention in cases—like this one -- involving no coercive or enforcement action by the State.” The high court is expected to hear the case later this year or early next year.