414
Opinion of the Court
1640 to rescind the mortgage agreement and to reduce the bank's claim by the amount of their actual and statutory damages.
The Circuit Court of the 15th Judicial Circuit of Florida agreed that under § 1640 the Beaches were entitled to "offset the amount owed to Great Western" by $396 in actual damages and $1,000 in statutory damages because the bank had overstated the monthly mortgage payment by $0.58 and the finance charge by $201.84. But the court rejected the Beaches' effort to rescind the mortgage under § 1635, holding that the loan at issue was immune to rescission as part of a "residential mortgage transaction" (defined in § 1602(w)) and, in the alternative, that any right to rescind had expired after three years, in 1989. The court found it telling that Congress had included no saving clause to revive an expired right of rescission as a defense in the nature of recoupment or setoff.
The State's intermediate appellate court affirmed, Beach v. Great Western Bank, 670 So. 2d 986 (Fla. 4th Dist. Ct. App. 1996), and so did the Supreme Court of Florida, which addressed only the issue of rescission as a defense, Beach v. Great Western Bank, 692 So. 2d 146 (1997).4 That court remarked on the plain language of § 1635(f) as evidence of unconditional congressional intent to limit the right of rescission to three years and explained that its prior cases permitting a defense of recoupment by an ostensibly barred claim were distinguishable because, among other things, they involved statutes of limitation, not statutes extinguishing rights defensively asserted.
Because the reading of § 1635(f) given by the Supreme Court of Florida conflicts with the decisions of several other
payments scheduled to repay the obligation, in violation of § 1638(a)(6); and (5) the total of payments, in violation of § 1638(a)(5).
4 Although the per curiam opinion posed the question as one "[u]nder Florida law," 692 So. 2d, at 147, it distinguished cases based on state law as inapposite and held that a defense of rescission was unavailable under the Act after three years.
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