Transcript:
Argument of Justice Souter
Mr. Souter: The second case which I have to announce is consolidated case number 94-834, North Star Steel Company v Charles Thomas.
This case and no case that is consolidated would come to us on a certiorari to the Third Circuit.
In each of these cases, the respondents brought claims in the Federal District Court in Pennsylvania, claiming that the petitioners, who were their employers, had laid off employees without giving the 60-day notice required by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification act known as WARN.
WARN does not provide a statute of limitations.
Petitioner has moved for summary judgment arguing that the court should borrow the six month statute of limitations from the National Labor Relations Act and their respondent’s action could be barred by such a limitation period.
The Third Circuit consolidated two appeals and held that this statute of limitations for WARN should be borrowed from state law.
In an opinion authored by Justice Souter and filed with the clerk of the court today and I should say incidentally that the opinion in Wyoming v. Nebraska was also authored by Justice Souter, we affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals and hold that state law is the proper source of the statute of limitations for the WARN Act.
The presumption that state law should provide the limitation periods for federal statute they do not provide their own, is long standing and settle.
Only when state limitations period would frustrate, the objectives of the cause of the action at issue have we departed from that rule and here because several analogous state statute provide limitations period that would not frustrate the state policy, beside the point that a federal analogue also exists.
In this case Justice Scalia has filed an opinion concurring in the judgment.
