Supreme Court Decides McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates v McKesson Corp.

On June 20, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court decided McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corp., No. 23-1226, holding that the Hobbs Act does not bind district courts in civil enforcement proceedings to a federal agency’s interpretation of a statute.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) prohibits a business from sending an “unsolicited advertisement” by fax to a “telephone facsimile machine” absent an opt-out notice informing recipients that they can choose not to receive future faxes. A recipient of a fax that lacks the required opt-out notice may sue the sender for damages and injunctive relief. The TCPA sets a floor of $500 in damages for each unlawful fax.

In 2009 and 2010, McKesson Corporation sent unsolicited fax advertisements to various medical practices to promote its health care products. Some recipients received the faxes on a traditional fax machine while others received them through online fax services, either by email or through an online portal. One of the recipients, Mclaughlin Chiropractic Associates, sued McKesson in federal district court after receiving 12 unlawful faxes from it on a traditional fax machine that lacked the required opt-out notice. McLaughlin sought to represent a class of other fax recipients drawing no distinction between recipients who received the faxes on traditional fax machines versus those that received them through an online fax service. The district court certified the proposed class.

While McLaughlin’s lawsuit was ongoing, another company petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a declaratory ruling about whether the TCPA applies to faxes received through online fax services. The FCC ultimately issued an order that “an online fax service is not a ‘telephone facsimile machine’” as defined in the TCPA. McKesson alerted the district court to the FCC’s order. It argued that because, under the Administrative Orders Review Act, commonly known as the Hobbs Act, a party may seek pre-enforcement judicial review of an FCC order only in a federal court of appeals, district courts are barred from disagreeing with an agency’s interpretation of a statute. The district court agreed that it lacked authority to question the FCC’s order, and it therefore granted a summary judgment to McKesson on the claims involving faxes received through online fax services and decertified the class. That left Mclaughlin with claims based on only the 12 faxes it received and cabined the available statutory damages to $6,000. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed. McLaughlin sought — and was granted — a writ of certiorari.

The Supreme Court reversed. It explained that there are three categories of statutes which authorize pre-enforcement judicial review of a federal agency’s statutory interpretation: (1) those statutes that expressly preclude judicial review in subsequent enforcement proceedings; (2) those that expressly authorize (or at least expressly contemplate) judicial review in subsequent enforcement proceedings; and (3) those that are silent as to whether a party may contest the agency’s legal interpretation in subsequent enforcement proceedings. The Hobbs Act falls within the third category.

The Court found that for statutes that neither expressly preclude nor expressly authorize judicial review, the default rule is that a district court must independently determine whether the agency’s statutory interpretation is correct, applying ordinary principles of statutory interpretation. The Court noted that it has long recognized a basic presumption of judicial review of an agency action, and that presumption is also codified in the Administrative Procedure Act. Moreover, it would be impractical and waste resources to demand that every potentially affected party bring or join pre-enforcement Hobbs Act challenges against every agency rule or order that might possibly affect them someday. When Congress wants to bar a district court in an enforcement proceeding from reviewing an agency’s interpretation of a statute, Congress can and must say so. Since the Hobbs Act does not, the default rule applied, and the district court should have assessed whether the FCC’s interpretation of the TCPA was correct.

The Court rejected McLaughlin’s argument that the default rule was overridden by the Hobbs Act since it grants courts of appeals “exclusive jurisdiction … to determine the validity” of an agency order. If a district court in an enforcement proceeding disagrees with an agency’s statutory interpretation, the Court explained, it does not issue a declaratory judgment that the agency’s order is invalid; rather, it merely determines the liability of the defendant before it under the correct interpretation of the statute.

The Court reversed and remanded for the district court to construe the TCPA provision at issue under ordinary principles of statutory construction, affording appropriate respect to the FCC’s interpretation.

Justice Kavanaugh delivered the opinion of the Court, in which the Chief Justice and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett joined.

Justice Kagan filed a dissenting opinion in which Justices Sotomayor and Jackson joined.