Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s first opinion for the high court Monday decided that a company may collect debts it purchased without violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
“Disruptive dinnertime calls, downright deceit, and more besides drew Congress’s eye to the debt collection industry,” Gorsuch wrote in the high court’s unanimous opinion.
“From that scrutiny emerged the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, a statute that authorizes private lawsuits and weighty fines designed to deter wayward collection practices. So perhaps it comes as little surprise that we now face a question about who exactly qualifies as a ‘debt collector’ subject to the Act’s rigors.”
Gorsuch continues to explain that repo men qualify as debt collectors, but the question before the court was, “[W]hat if you purchase a debt and then try to collect it for yourself — does that make you a ‘debt collector’ too?”
In Henson v. Santander Consumer USA Inc., Santander attempted to collect the petitioners’ debts that Santander had purchased from CitiFinancial Auto. The petitioners believed the way Santander tried to collect the debt violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, given the act’s definition of a “debt collector.” On Monday, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower courts’ rulings and slapped down the petitioners.
“If Congress wanted to exempt all present debt owners from its debt collector definition, petitioners submit, it would have used the present participle ‘owing.’ That would have better sufficed to do the job — to make clear that you must collect debts currently ‘owing … another’ before implicating the Act,” Gorsuch wrote. “But this much doesn’t follow even as a matter of good grammar, let alone ordinary meaning.”
Gorsuch’s opinion concludes by noting “reasonable people can disagree with how Congress balanced the various social costs and benefits” in the matter under consideration and Congress may choose to “alter the judgments it made in the past” at some point in the future.
“Constant competition between constable and quarry, regulator and regulated, can come as no surprise in our changing world,” Gorsuch wrote. “But neither should the proper role of the judiciary in that process — to apply, not amend, the work of the People’s representatives.”
