MACQUARIE INFRASTRUCTURE CORP. et al. v. MOAB PARTNERS, L. P., et al.

Certiorari To The United States Court Of Appeals For The Second Circuit

No. 22–1165. Argued January 16, 2024—Decided April 12, 2024

Petitioner Macquarie Infrastructure Corporation owns a subsidiary that operates terminals to store bulk liquid commodities, including No. 6 fuel oil, a byproduct of the refining process with a typical sulfur content close to 3%. In 2016, the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization formally adopted IMO 2020, a regulation capping the sulfur content of fuel oil used in shipping at 0.5% by 2020. In the ensuing years, Macquarie did not discuss IMO 2020 in its public offering documents. In February 2018, however, Macquarie announced a drop in the amount of storage contracted for use by its subsidiary due in part to the decline in the No. 6 fuel oil market. Macquarie’s stock price fell 41%.

   In response, Moab Partners, L. P., sued Macquarie and various officer defendants. Moab alleged, among other things, that Macquarie violated Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 10b–5(b)—which makes it unlawful to omit material facts in connection with buying or selling securities when that omission renders “statements made” misleading—because it had a duty to disclose the IMO 2020 information under Item 303 of SEC Regulation S–K. Item 303 requires companies to disclose “known trends or uncertainties that have had or that are reasonably likely to have a material favorable or unfavorable impact on net sales or revenues or income from continuing operations” in periodic filings with the SEC. 17 CFR §229.303(b)(2)(ii). The District Court dismissed Moab’s complaint. The Second Circuit reversed, concluding in part that Moab’s allegations concerning the likely material effect of IMO 2020 gave rise to a duty to disclose under Item 303, and Macquarie’s Item 303 violation alone could sustain Moab’s §10(b) and Rule 10b–5 claim. See 2022 WL 17815767, *1–*2.

Held: Pure omissions are not actionable under Rule 10b–5(b). Rule 10b–5(b) makes it unlawful “[t]o make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading.” 17 CFR §240.10b–5(b). In addition to prohibiting “any untrue statement of a material fact”—i.e., false statements or lies—the Rule also prohibits omitting a material fact necessary “to make the statements made . . . not misleading.” Ibid. This case turns on whether this second prohibition bars only half-truths or instead extends to pure omissions.

  A pure omission occurs when a speaker says nothing, in circumstances that do not give any special significance to that silence. Half-truths, on the other hand, are “representations that state the truth only so far as it goes, while omitting critical qualifying information.” Universal Health Services, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Escobar, 579 U. S. 176, 188. Rule 10b–5(b) requires disclosure of information necessary to ensure that statements already made are clear and complete. Logically and by its plain text, Rule 10b–5(b) therefore covers half-truths, not pure omissions, because it requires identifying affirmative assertions (i.e., “statements made”) before determining if other facts are needed to make those statements “not misleading.”

  Statutory context confirms what the text plainly provides. Section 11(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 prohibits any registration statement that “omit[s] to state a material fact required to be stated therein.” 15 U. S. C. §77k(a). By its terms, §11(a) creates liability for failure to speak. Neither §10(b) nor Rule 10b–5(b) contains language similar to §11(a), and that omission is telling.

  “Silence, absent a duty to disclose, is not misleading under Rule 10b–5.” Basic Inc. v. Levinson, 485 U. S. 224, 239, n. 17. A duty to disclose, however, does not automatically render silence misleading under Rule 10b–5(b). The failure to disclose information required by Item 303 can support a Rule 10b–5(b) claim only if the omission renders affirmative statements made misleading. Moab and the United States suggest that a plaintiff does not need to plead any statements rendered misleading by a pure omission because reasonable investors know that the Exchange Act requires issuers to file periodic informational statements in which companies must furnish the information required by Item 303. But that argument reads the words “statements made” out of Rule 10b–5(b) and shifts the focus of that Rule and §10(b) from fraud to disclosure. See Chiarella v. United States, 445 U. S. 222, 234–235 (“Section 10(b) is aptly described as a catchall provision, but what it catches must be fraud”). Moab also contends that without private liability for pure omissions under Rule 10b–5(b), there will be “broad immunity any time an issuer fraudulently omits information Congress and the SEC require it to disclose.” Brief for Respondent Moab Partners 1. But private parties remain free to bring claims based on Item 303 violations that create misleading half-truths, and the SEC retains authority to prosecute violations of its own rules and regulations, including Item 303. Pp. 4–8.

Vacated and remanded.

 Sotomayor, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.


BISSONNETTE et al. v. LePAGE BAKERIES PARK ST., LLC, et al.

Certiorari To The United States Court Of Appeals For The Second Circuit

No. 23–51. Argued February 20, 2024—Decided April 12, 2024

Respondent Flowers Foods, Inc. produces and markets baked goods that are distributed nationwide. Petitioners Neal Bissonnette and Tyler Wojnarowski owned the rights to distribute Flowers products in certain parts of Connecticut. To purchase those rights, they entered into contracts with Flowers that require any disputes to be arbitrated under the Federal Arbitration Act, 9 U. S. C. §1 et seq. After petitioners sued Flowers and two of its subsidiaries for violating state and federal wage laws, Flowers moved to compel arbitration. Petitioners responded that they are exempt from coverage under the FAA because they fall within an exception in §1 of the Act for “contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” The District Court dismissed the case in favor of arbitration, concluding that petitioners were not “transportation workers” exempt from the Act under §1. The Second Circuit ultimately affirmed on the ground that the §1 exemption was available only to workers in the transportation industry, but that petitioners were in the bakery industry. 49 F. 4th 655, 661–662.

Held: A transportation worker need not work in the transportation industry to be exempt from coverage under §1 of the FAA. Pp. 4–9.

  (a) The Court has long recognized that the exemption in §1 is limited to transportation workers. See Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams, 532 U. S. 105. Applying the ejusdem generis canon of statutory interpretation to §1, the Court in Circuit City read the general phrase “class of workers engaged in . . . commerce” to be “controlled and defined by reference to” the specific categories “seamen” and “railroad employees” that precede it. Id., at 115. The Court concluded that the “linkage” between “seamen” and “railroad employees” is that they are both transportation workers, id., at 118–119, 121, and the Court thus interpreted the class of workers in the residual clause of §1 to be limited in the same way.

  The Court again considered the scope of the residual clause in Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon and declined to adopt an industrywide approach to §1, rejecting the employee’s claim that she was a member of a “class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” simply because she worked for an airline and carried out its customary work. See 596 U. S. 450, 460. Instead, the language of §1—referring to “ ‘workers’ ” who are “engaged” in commerce—focuses on the performance of work rather than the industry of the employer. Id., at 456 (quoting New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira, 586 U. S. 105, 116). The relevant question was what the employee does at the airline, not what the airline does generally. Saxon, 596 U. S., at 456.

   Here the Second Circuit fashioned its transportation-industry requirement without any guide in the text of §1 or this Court’s precedents. The Second Circuit decided that an entity would be considered within the transportation industry if it “pegs its charges chiefly to the movement of goods or passengers” and its “predominant source of commercial revenue is generated by that movement.” 49 F.4th, at 661. But that test would often turn on arcane riddles about the nature of a company’s services. For example, does a pizza delivery company derive its revenue mainly from pizza or delivery? Extensive discovery might be necessary before deciding a motion to compel arbitration, adding expense and delay to every FAA case. That “complexity and uncertainty” would “ ‘breed[ ] litigation from a statute that seeks to avoid it.’ ” Circuit City, 532 U. S., at 123 (quoting Allied-Bruce Terminix Cos. v. Dobson, 513 U. S. 265, 275). Pp. 4–7.

  (b) Flowers argues that the §1 exemption would sweep too broadly without an implied transportation-industry requirement. Because “virtually all products move in interstate commerce,” Flowers warns that nearly all workers who load or unload goods would be exempt from arbitration. But §1 does not define the class of exempt workers in such limitless terms. Instead, as the Court held in Saxon, a transportation worker is one who is “actively” “ ‘engaged in transportation’ of . . . goods across borders via the channels of foreign or interstate commerce.” 596 U. S., at 458 (quoting Circuit City, 532 U. S., at 121). In other words, a transportation worker “must at least play a direct and ‘necessary role in the free flow of goods’ across borders.” 596 U. S., at 458 (quoting Circuit City, 532 U. S., at 121). These requirements “undermine[ ] any attempt to give the provision a sweeping, open-ended construction,” instead limiting §1 to its appropriately “narrow” scope. Id., at 118. Pp. 7–9.

49 F. 4th 655, vacated and remanded.

 Roberts, C. J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.


SHEETZ v. COUNTY OF EL DORADO, CALIFORNIA

Certiorari To The Court Of Appeal Of California, Third Appellate District

No. 22–1074. Argued January 9, 2024—Decided April 12, 2024

As a condition of receiving a residential building permit, petitioner George Sheetz was required by the County of El Dorado to pay a $23,420 traffic impact fee. The fee was part of a “General Plan” enacted by the County’s Board of Supervisors to address increasing demand for public services spurred by new development. The fee amount was not based on the costs of traffic impacts specifically attributable to Sheetz’s particular project, but rather was assessed according to a rate schedule that took into account the type of development and its location within the County. Sheetz paid the fee under protest and obtained the permit. He later sought relief in state court, claiming that conditioning the building permit on the payment of a traffic impact fee constituted an unlawful “exaction” of money in violation of the Takings Clause. In Sheetz’s view, the Court’s decisions in Nollan v. California Coastal Comm’n, 483 U. S. 825, and Dolan v. City of Tigard, 512 U. S. 374, required the County to make an individualized determination that the fee imposed on him was necessary to offset traffic congestion attributable to his project. The courts below ruled against Sheetz based on their view that Nollan and Dolan apply only to permit conditions imposed on an ad hoc basis by administrators, not to a fee like this one imposed on a class of property owners by Board-enacted legislation. 84 Cal. App. 5th 394, 402, 300 Cal. Rptr. 3d 308, 312.

Held: The Takings Clause does not distinguish between legislative and administrative land-use permit conditions. Pp. 4–11.

 (a) When the government wants to take private property for a public purpose, the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause requires the government to provide the owner “just compensation.” The Takings Clause saves individual property owners from bearing “public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole.” Armstrong v. United States, 364 U. S. 40, 49. Even so, the States have substantial authority to regulate land use, see Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U. S. 365, and a State law that merely restricts land use in a way “reasonably necessary to the effectuation of a substantial government purpose” is not a taking unless it saps too much of the property’s value or frustrates the owner’s investment-backed expectations. Penn Central Transp. Co. v. New York City, 438 U. S. 104, 123, 127. Similarly, when the government can deny a building permit to further a “legitimate police-power purpose,” it can also place conditions on the permit that serve the same end. Nollan, 483 U. S., at 836. For example, if a proposed development will “substantially increase traffic congestion,” the government may condition the building permit on the owner’s willingness “to deed over the land needed to widen a public road.” Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management Dist., 570 U. S. 595, 605. But when the government withholds or conditions a building permit for reasons unrelated to its legitimate land-use interests, those actions amount to extortion. See Nollan, 483 U. S., at 837.

 The Court’s decisions in Nollan and Dolan address the potential abuse of the permitting process by setting out a two-part test modeled on the unconstitutional conditions doctrine. See Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U. S. 593, 597. First, permit conditions must have an “essential nexus” to the government’s land-use interest, ensuring that the government is acting to further its stated purpose, not leveraging its permitting monopoly to exact private property without paying for it. See Nollan, 483 U. S., at 837, 841. Second, permit conditions must have “rough proportionality” to the development’s impact on the land-use interest and may not require a landowner to give up (or pay) more than is necessary to mitigate harms resulting from new development. See Dolan, 512 U. S., at 391, 393; Koontz, 570 U. S., at 612–615. Pp. 4–6.

 (b) The County’s traffic impact fee was upheld below based on the view that the Nollan/Dolan test does not apply to monetary fees imposed by a legislature, but nothing in constitutional text, history, or precedent supports exempting legislatures from ordinary takings rules. The Constitution provides “no textual justification for saying that the existence or the scope of a State’s power to expropriate private property without just compensation varies according to the branch of government effecting the expropriation.” Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Dept. of Environmental Protection, 560 U. S. 702, 714 (plurality opinion). Historical practice similarly shows that legislation was the conventional way that governments at the state and national levels exercised their eminent domain power to obtain land for various governmental purposes, and to provide compensation to dispossessed landowners. The Fifth Amendment enshrined this long standing practice. Precedent points the same way as text and history. A legislative exception to the Nollan/Dolan test “conflicts with the rest of [the Court’s] takings jurisprudence,” which does not otherwise distinguish between legislation and other official acts. Knick v. Township of Scott, 588 U. S. 180, 185. That is true of precedents involving physical takings, regulatory takings, and the unconstitutional conditions doctrine which underlies the Nollan/Dolan test. Pp. 7–10.

 (c) As the parties now agree, conditions on building permits are not exempt from scrutiny under Nollan and Dolan just because a legislative body imposed them. Whether a permit condition imposed on a class of properties must be tailored with the same degree of specificity as a permit condition that targets a particular development is an issue for the state courts to consider in the first instance, as are issues concerning whether the parties’ other arguments are preserved and how those arguments bear on Sheetz’s legal challenge. Pp. 10–11.

84 Cal. App. 5th 394, 300 Cal. Rptr. 3d 308, vacated and remanded.

 Barrett, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court. Sotomayor, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which Jackson, J., joined. Gorsuch, J., filed a concurring opinion. Kavanaugh, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which Kagan and Jackson, JJ., joined.