Justice THOMAS delivered the opinion of the Court. A participant in an employee benefit plan covered by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), 88 Stat. 829, as amended, 29 U.S.C. 1001 et seq., may bring a civil action under 502(a)(1)(B) to recover benefits due under the terms of the plan. 29 U.S.C. 1132(a)(1)(B). Courts have generally required participants to exhaust the plan's administrative remedies before filing suit to recover benefits. ERISA does not, however,...
Justice SOTOMAYOR delivered the opinion of the Court. The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "[n]o person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself...." The question here is whether the Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from introducing evidence from a court-ordered mental evaluation of a criminal defendant to rebut that defendant's presentation of expert testimony in support of a defense of voluntary intoxication. We hold...
PER CURIAM. The writ of certiorari is dismissed as improvidently granted. It is so ordered. Justice BREYER, with whom Justice SOTOMAYOR and Justice KAGAN join, dissenting. Section 302(a) of the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947, 61 Stat. 157, as amended, an antibribery provision, makes it a crime for an employer "to pay, lend, or deliver, or agree to pay, lend, or deliver, any money or other thing of value" to a labor union that represents or seeks to represent its employees. 29 U.S.C....
Justice ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court. The question in this case concerns the procedure that is available for a defendant in a civil case who seeks to enforce a forum-selection clause. We reject petitioner's argument that such a clause may be enforced by a motion to dismiss under 28 U.S.C. 1406(a) or Rule 12(b)(3) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Instead, a forum-selection clause may be enforced by a motion to transfer under 1404(a) (2006 ed., Supp. V), which provides...
Justice ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court. When a state prisoner asks a federal court to set aside a sentence due to ineffective assistance of counsel during plea bargaining, our cases require that the federal court use a "`doubly deferential'" standard of review that gives both the state court and the defense attorney the benefit of the doubt. Cullen v. Pinholster, 563 U.S. ___, ___, 131 S.Ct. 1388 , 1403, 179 L.Ed.2d 557 (2011). In this case, the Sixth Circuit failed to apply that...
Justice SCALIA delivered the opinion of the Court. We consider whether attempting to compel a person to recommend that his employer approve an investment constitutes "the obtaining of property from another" under 18 U.S.C. 1951(b)(2). I New York's Common Retirement Fund is an employee pension fund for the State of New York and its local governments. As sole trustee of the Fund, the State Comptroller chooses Fund investments. When the Comptroller decides to approve an investment he issues a...
Justice KENNEDY delivered the opinion of the Court. Two women then resident in New York were married in a lawful ceremony in Ontario, Canada, in 2007. Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer returned to their home in New York City. When Spyer died in 2009, she left her entire estate to Windsor. Windsor sought to claim the estate tax exemption for surviving spouses. She was barred from doing so, however, by a federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act, which excludes a same-sex partner from the definition...
Chief Justice ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the Court. The public is currently engaged in an active political debate over whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. That question has also given rise to litigation. In this case, petitioners, who oppose same-sex marriage, ask us to decide whether the Equal Protection Clause "prohibits the State of California from defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman." Pet. for Cert. i. Respondents, same-sex couples who wish to marry,...
Chief Justice ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the Court. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 employed extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem. Section 5 of the Act required States to obtain federal permission before enacting any law related to voting — a drastic departure from basic principles of federalism. And 4 of the Act applied that requirement only to some States — an equally dramatic departure from the principle that all States enjoy equal sovereignty. This was strong...
Justice ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court. This case is about a little girl (Baby Girl) who is classified as an Indian because she is 1.2% (3/256) Cherokee. Because Baby Girl is classified in this way, the South Carolina Supreme Court held that certain provisions of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 required her to be taken, at the age of 27 months, from the only parents she had ever known and handed over to her biological father, who had attempted to relinquish his parental...
Justice ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court. Our decisions in Nollan v. California Coastal Comm'n, 483 U.S. 825 , 107 S.Ct. 3141, 97 L.Ed.2d 677 (1987), and Dolan v. City of Tigard, 512 U.S. 374 , 114 S.Ct. 2309, 129 L.Ed.2d 304 (1994), provide important protection against the misuse of the power of land-use regulation. In those cases, we held that a unit of government may not condition the approval of a land-use permit on the owner's relinquishment of a portion of his property...
Justice KENNEDY delivered the opinion of the Court. When the law grants persons the right to compensation for injury from wrongful conduct, there must be some demonstrated connection, some link, between the injury sustained and the wrong alleged. The requisite relation between prohibited conduct and compensable injury is governed by the principles of causation, a subject most often arising in elaborating the law of torts. This case requires the Court to define those rules in the context of...
Justice ALITO, delivered the opinion of the Court. We must decide whether federal law pre-empts the New Hampshire design-defect claim under which respondent Karen Bartlett recovered damages from petitioner Mutual Pharmaceutical, the manufacturer of sulindac, a generic nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID). New Hampshire law imposes a duty on manufacturers to ensure that the drugs they market are not unreasonably unsafe, and a drug's safety is evaluated by reference to both its chemical...
Justice ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court. In this case, we decide a question left open in Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth, 524 U.S. 742 , 118 S.Ct. 2257, 141 L.Ed.2d 633 (1998), and Faragher v. Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775 , 118 S.Ct. 2275, 141 L.Ed.2d 662 (1998), namely, who qualifies as a "supervisor" in a case in which an employee asserts a Title VII claim for workplace harassment Under Title VII, an employer's liability for such harassment may depend on the status of the...
Justice KENNEDY delivered the opinion of the Court. The University of Texas at Austin considers race as one of various factors in its undergraduate admissions process. Race is not itself assigned a numerical value for each applicant, but the University has committed itself to increasing racial minority enrollment on campus. It refers to this goal as a "critical mass." Petitioner, who is Caucasian, sued the University after her application was rejected. She contends that the University's use of...
Justice SCALIA delivered the opinion of the Court. We consider whether a contractual waiver of class arbitration is enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act when the plaintiff's cost of individually arbitrating a federal statutory claim exceeds the potential recovery. I Respondents are merchants who accept American Express cards. Their agreement with petitioners — American Express and a wholly owned subsidiary — contains a clause that requires all disputes between the parties to be...
Chief Justice ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the Court. The United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003 (Leadership Act), 117 Stat. 711, as amended, 22 U.S.C. 7601 et seq., outlined a comprehensive strategy to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS around the world. As part of that strategy, Congress authorized the appropriation of billions of dollars to fund efforts by nongovernmental organizations to assist in the fight. The Act imposes two related...
Justice SCALIA delivered the opinion of the Court. The National Voter Registration Act requires States to "accept and use" a uniform federal form to register voters for federal elections. The contents of that form (colloquially known as the Federal Form) are prescribed by a federal agency, the Election Assistance Commission. The Federal Form developed by the EAC does not require documentary evidence of citizenship; rather, it requires only that an applicant aver, under penalty of perjury, that...
Justice BREYER delivered the opinion of the Court. Company A sues Company B for patent infringement. The two companies settle under terms that require (1) Company B, the claimed infringer, not to produce the patented product until the patent's term expires, and (2) Company A, the patentee, to pay B many millions of dollars. Because the settlement requires the patentee to pay the alleged infringer, rather than the other way around, this kind of settlement agreement is often called a "reverse...
Justice KENNEDY delivered the opinion of the Court. Concerned that personal information collected by States in the licensing of motor vehicle drivers was being released — even sold — with resulting loss of privacy for many persons, Congress provided federal statutory protection. It enacted the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994, referred to here as the DPPA. See 18 U.S.C. 2721-2725. The DPPA regulates the disclosure of personal information contained in the records of state motor...
