Statutory Interpretation

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United States Supreme Court

Case Name: Henson, et al v. Santander Consumer USA, Inc.

Case No.: 16-349

Focus: Statutory Interpretation

A company may collect debts that it purchased for its own account, like Santander did here, without triggering the statutory definition in dispute.

By defining debt collectors to include those who regularly seek to collect debts “owed . . . another,” the statute’s plain language seems to focus on third party collection agents regularly collecting for a debt owner—not on a debt owner seeking to collect debts for itself. Petitioners’ arguments to the contrary do not dislodge the statute’s plain meaning. Petitioners point out that the word “owed” is the past participle of the verb “to owe,” and so suggest that the debt collector definition must exclude loan originators (who never seek to collect debts previously owed someone else) but embrace debt purchasers like Santander (who necessarily do). But past participles like “owed” are routinely used as adjectives to describe the present state of a thing. Congress also used the word “owed” to refer to present debt relationships in neighboring provisions of the Act, and petitioners have not rebutted the presumption that identical words in the same statute carry the same meaning. Neither would reading the word “owed” to refer to present debt relationships render any of the Act’s provisions surplusage, contrary to what petitioners suggest. Petitioners also contend that their interpretation best furthers the Act’s perceived purposes because, they primarily argue, if Congress had been aware of defaulted debt purchasers like Santander it would have treated them like traditional debt collectors because they pose similar risks of abusive collection practices. But it is not this Court’s job to rewrite a constitutionally valid text under the banner of speculation about what Congress might have done had it faced a question that, on everyone’s account, it never faced. And neither are petitioners’ policy arguments unassailable, as reasonable legislators might contend both ways on the question of how defaulted debt purchasers should be treated. This fact suggests for certain but one thing: that these are matters for Congress, not this Court, to resolve.

Affirmed

Dissenting:

Concurring:

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Attorney Derek A. Hawkins is the managing partner at Hawkins Law Offices LLC, where he heads up the firm’s startup law practice. He specializes in business formation, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, private equity and venture capital funding and mergers & acquisitions. Check out the website at www.hawkins-lawoffices.com or contact them at 262-737-8825.