Supreme Court’s new case deepens Planned Parenthood mystery

A new Supreme Court decision, FS Credit Opportunities v. Saba Capital Master Fund, doubles down on rules for when federal statutes can be enforced through private lawsuits. But it does so without citing Medina v. Planned Parenthood, a prior ruling that—under t

By the time the Supreme Court issued its new opinion on Thursday in FS Credit Opportunities v. Saba Capital Master Fund, the legal world already had a nagging question from its prior term: why did Medina v. Planned Parenthood break with the Court’s own framework for private enforcement of federal laws?.

About a year earlier, the justices handed down Medina. In that case. South Carolina committed what was described as an obvious violation of federal Medicaid law. yet the Court—under its Republican majority—appeared to bend over backward to prevent the patients affected by that violation from suing to enforce their rights. The Court’s Medina ruling also conflicted with a decision issued just two years earlier in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski.

That tension—between what the Court seemed to require in Medina and what it later reaffirmed in other cases—has now been reopened by the Court’s approach in FS Credit.

The two cases are not about the same subject. FS Credit is a securities law dispute about when investors may sue investment funds. Medina, by contrast, involved Medicaid and the question of when patients may bring suit against states for violating Medicaid law. Still, the legal mechanics at the center of both are closely related.

In FS Credit, the Supreme Court leaned on the doctrine of “implied causes of action”—the concept that some federal statutes allow private lawsuits even when they don’t spell out a right to sue in explicit terms.

The opinion’s starting point is blunt: “Congress. not the Judiciary. decides who may enforce the law.” The Court explained that not all federal laws may be enforced through lawsuits. and not all people who want to sue under a particular law are allowed to do so. In some instances, a statute explicitly authorizes private lawsuits or identifies who may bring them. In other cases, the right can be implied from statutory text that doesn’t expressly provide for suits.

Before Medina, the question of when such private rights may be implied was governed by the Court’s decision in Gonzaga University v. Doe (2002). Under Gonzaga, “for a statute to create private rights [to sue], its text must be phrased in terms of the persons benefited.”

The Medina case, by that preexisting logic, looked like a straightforward fit. The facts described in the Medina dispute involved a federal Medicaid provision that permits Medicaid patients to choose their health providers. The allegation was that South Carolina violated that law by refusing to allow Medicaid patients to choose Planned Parenthood as their health provider.

The statutory text quoted in connection with Medina requires that “any individual eligible for medical assistance” may obtain assistance from “any institution. agency. community pharmacy. or person” qualified to provide the services. including an organization that provides them or arranges for their availability on a prepayment basis. The text concludes with a pronoun (“him”) tied back to the individuals eligible for the benefit.

Under the Gonzaga framework, that individual-centric language should matter. Prior to Medina, the Court repeatedly reaffirmed the Gonzaga standard, most recently in Talevski. There. the Court held that a federal law creates an implied cause of action when it is “phrased in terms of the persons benefited. ” uses “rights-creating. ” “individual-centric language. ” and has an “unmistakable focus on the benefited class.”.

And yet, in Medina, the six Republican justices—according to the description of the ruling—rendered that statutory promise unenforceable. The criticism here centers on how the Medina majority approached the legal test itself. In the Medina opinion. the phrase “phrased in terms of the persons benefitted” does not appear anywhere in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion.

The reading of that decision, as laid out, is that Medina appeared to create a new hurdle: that no statute may create an implied cause of action unless the statute includes the “magic word” “right,” such as in an “individual’s rights.”

FS Credit, however, does not treat Medina as if it quietly established a new baseline. The FS Credit opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, does not cite Medina at any point. Instead, Barrett’s opinion leans heavily on decisions the Court refused to follow in Medina.

Barrett’s reasoning points back to the Gonzaga framework. FS Credit holds that to create a private right. a statute must use “rights-creating language” aimed at protecting “a particular class of persons.” It quotes Gonzaga’s key standard that statutes create private rights when they are “phrased in terms of the persons benefited.”.

That matters because it undermines the idea that Medina was a simple one-off application of a freshly minted rule. If the Court wanted to dispel the impression that Medina carved out a special path to deny relief to abortion providers and their patients. the opinion in FS Credit—on its own terms—did not explain why the Medina rule would not apply.

Two possible distinctions are raised in the account of these decisions, but each runs into a problem.

One possibility is that Medina dealt with Medicaid. a federal spending program. while FS Credit involved a statute governing private businesses. In Medina. Gorsuch’s opinion is described as saying “spending-power statutes like Medicaid are especially unlikely” to contain implied causes of action. so the argument goes that the “magic word” requirement may have been limited to spending programs.

But Talevski, decided two years before Medina, is said to have mocked exactly that kind of carveout. The losing party in Talevski urged the Court to reject decades of precedent and “rewrite” a key federal law to exempt federal spending programs from the Gonzaga rule. Talevski, described here, rejected that “invitation” and refused to “reimagine Congress’s handiwork (and our precedent interpreting it).”.

A second possibility is that Medina involved a lawsuit brought under “Section 1983,” a civil rights provision that allows individuals to bring claims against state governments and state officials. FS Credit did not involve a Section 1983 claim.

But the complication is that Gonzaga itself arose from a Section 1983 case. So, as long as Gonzaga was the governing rule, the reasoning that the Court used in FS Credit would have applied to Section 1983 claims too. Medina is described as the only exception.

Without an explanation in FS Credit about how Medina can be distinguished—and with FS Credit returning to Gonzaga’s pre-Medina framework—the concern is that Medina was not decided by a consistent reading of the doctrine. The central concern raised is that Medina was decided in a way that foreclosed enforcement of rights for abortion providers and their patients because of what the Republican justices preferred.

There is a broader principle behind that argument: the rule-of-law expectation that similar cases are treated similarly. no matter whether the group involved is one that individual judges dislike or view as morally repugnant. The account invokes Justice Antonin Scalia’s 1989 essay. describing a “general rule” that binds not only lower courts but also the majority itself—adding that if the next case had opposite facts and opposite policy outcomes. the preferences that might drive a decision would have to yield to the constraint of the rule.

Medina, in this telling, fails that test because it appears to allow a different result for abortion providers and abortion patients, blocking their ability to sue in a way other litigants would not face.

The through-line from Medina to FS Credit is this: FS Credit adopts the Gonzaga framework—rights-creating. individual-centric language focused on the “persons benefited”—and it does so without citing Medina. despite Medina’s centrality to the doctrine. For people trying to understand whether the Court is applying a stable method—or building exceptions—the gap between the two decisions is the story’s most unsettled part.

Supreme Court FS Credit Opportunities v. Saba Capital Master Fund Medina v. Planned Parenthood Planned Parenthood Medicaid Gonzaga University v. Doe Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski implied causes of action Section 1983