Barnhart v. Peabody Coal Co., 537 U.S. 149, 2 (2003)

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150

BARNHART v. PEABODY COAL CO.

Syllabus

timely assignments were made. The companies obtained summary judgments, and the Sixth Circuit affirmed.

Held: Initial assignments made after October 1, 1993, are valid despite their untimeliness. Pp. 157-172.

(a) The companies' contention that the Commissioner's failure is "jurisdictional," so that affected beneficiaries may never be assigned and their former employers may go scot free, is as unsupportable as it is counterintuitive. Pp. 157-171.

(1) This Court has rejected an argument comparable to the companies' position that couching the duty in terms of the mandatory "shall" together with a specific deadline leaves the Commissioner with no authority to make an initial assignment on or after October 1, 1993. In Brock v. Pierce County, 476 U. S. 253, the Court found that the Secretary of Labor's 120-day deadline to issue a final determination on a complaint of federal grant fund misuse was meant to spur him to action, not limit the scope of his authority, so that his untimely action was valid. Nor, since Brock, has this Court ever construed a provision that the Government "shall" act within a specified time, without more, as a jurisdictional limit precluding action later. If a statute does not specify a consequence for noncompliance with statutory timing provisions, federal courts will not ordinarily impose their own coercive sanction. United States v. James Daniel Good Real Property, 510 U. S. 43, 63. Hence the oddity of a claim at this date that late official action should shift financial burdens from otherwise responsible private purses to the public fisc, let alone siphon money from funds set aside for a different public purpose, like the AML Fund for land reclamation. The point would be the same even if Brock were the only case on the subject. The Coal Act was passed six years after Brock, when Congress was presumably aware that the Court does not readily infer congressional intent to limit an agency's power to finish a mandatory job merely from a specification to act by a certain time. Nothing more limiting than "shall" is to be found in the Coal Act: no express language supports the companies, while structure, purpose, and legislative history go against them. Structural clues support the Commissioner in the Act's other instances of combining "shall" with a specific date that could not possibly be read to prohibit action outside the statutory period. See §§ 9705(a)(1), 9702(a)(1), 9704(h). In each of these instances, a conclusion is based on plausibility grounds: had Congress meant to set a counterintuitive limit on authority to act, it would have said more than it did, and would surely not have couched its intent in language Brock had already held to lack any clear jurisdictional significance. Pp. 157-163.

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