Volume 473 — United States Reports

This is a list of all United States Supreme Court cases from volume 473 of the United States Reports:

Respondent's decedent, her son who was an Army private, was off duty at Fort Bliss and away from the base when he was kidnaped and murdered by… Held: Recovery under the Act is barred by the Feres doctrine, which is based, inter alia, on the special relationship of the soldier to his superiors, the effects of the maintenance of suits under the Act on discipline, and the extreme results that might obtain if such suits were allowed for negligent orders given or negligent acts…

The Rules on Containers (Rules) require that some cargo containers owned or leased by marine shipping companies that otherwise would be loaded or unloaded within the local port area… Held: The Board's partial invalidation of the Rules as applied in the contexts in question is inconsistent with National Woodwork Manufacturers Assn. v. NLRB, 386 U.S. 612, 87 S.Ct. 1250, 18 L.Ed.2d 357, and NLRB v. Longshoremen, 447 U.S. 490, 100 S.Ct. 2305, 65 L.Ed.2d 289 ( ILA I ). Pp. 73-84.

Pattern Makers League of North America v. NLRB, 473 U.S. 95 (1985), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that the NLRB's policy of affording employees a right to resign without paying union dues is not facially unlawful. The court deferred to the NLRB's expert judgment rather than come to a firm conclusion. In conjunction with NLRB v. Granite State Joint Board, this case supersedes the reasoning of Allis-Chalmers Corp. v. Lueck.

Respondent, a claims examiner for petitioner insurance company (petitioner), is a beneficiary under employee benefit plans administered by petitioner and governed by the Employee Retirement Income… Held: Section 409(a) does not provide a cause of action for extra-contractual damages to a beneficiary caused by improper or untimely processing of benefit claims. Pp. 139-148.

Respondents were arrested following the warrantless raid of a house in Kentucky by local and state police officers who were seeking a… Held: Section 1988 does not allow attorney's fees to be recovered from a governmental entity when a plaintiff sues governmental employees only in their personal capacities and prevails; accordingly, since this case was necessarily litigated as a personal-capacity and not as an official-capacity action, it was error to award fees against…

Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank of Johnson City, 473 U.S. 172 (1985), is a U.S. Supreme Court case that limited access to federal court for plaintiffs alleging uncompensated takings of private property under the Fifth Amendment. In June 2019, this case was overruled in part by the Court's decision in Knick v. Township of Scott, Pennsylvania.

Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985), was a United States Supreme Court case that discussed whether copies of copyrighted works could be regarded as stolen property for the purposes of a law which criminalized the interstate transportation of property that had been "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" and holding that they could not be so regarded under that law.

Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U.S. 234 (1985), was a United States Supreme Court case regarding Congress' power to abrogate the Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity of the states.

Title 38 U.S.C. § 3404(c) limits to $10 the fee that may be paid an attorney or agent who represents a veteran seeking benefits from… Held: This Court has jurisdiction of the appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1252, which grants the Court jurisdiction over an appeal "from an interlocutory or final judgment, decree or order of any court of the United States . . . holding an Act of Congress unconstitutional in any civil action . . . to which the United States or any of its agencies,…

Petitioner School District adopted two programs—Shared Time and Community Education—that provide classes to nonpublic school students at public expense in classrooms located in and leased from the… Held: The Shared Time and Community Education programs have the "primary or principal" effect of advancing religion, and therefore violate the dictates of the Establishment Clause. Pp. 381-398.

Aguilar v. Felton, 473 U.S. 402 (1985), was a United States Supreme Court case holding that New York City's program that sent public school teachers into parochial schools to provide remedial education to disadvantaged children pursuant to Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 necessitated an excessive entanglement of church and state and violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., 473 U.S. 432 (1985), was a U.S. Supreme Court case involving discrimination against intellectually disabled people.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 18 U.S.C. §§ 1961-1968, which is directed at "racketeering activity"—defined in § 1961(1) to encompass, inter alia, acts… Held: There is no requirement that a private action under § 1964(c) can proceed only against a defendant who has already been convicted of a predicate act or of a RICO violation. A prior-conviction requirement is not supported by RICO's history, its language, or considerations of policy.

United States v. Montoya De Hernandez, 473 U.S. 531 (1985), was a U.S. Supreme Court case regarding the Fourth Amendment's border search exception and balloon swallowing.

The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) requires manufacturers of pesticides, as a precondition for registering a pesticide, to submit research data to the Environmental… Held: Appellees' Article III claims demonstrate sufficient ripeness to establish a concrete case or controversy. Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto Co., 467 U.S. 986, 104 S.Ct. 2862, 81 L.Ed.2d 815 distinguished.

Mitsubishi Motors Corp. v. Soler Chrysler-Plymouth, Inc., 473 U.S. 614 (1985), is a United States Supreme Court decision concerning arbitration of antitrust claims. The Court heard the case on appeal from the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which had ruled that the arbitration clause in a Puerto Rican car dealer's franchise agreement was broad enough to reach its antitrust claim. By a 5–3 margin it upheld the lower court, requiring that the dealer arbitrate its claim before a panel in Tokyo, as stipulated in the contract. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote for the majority that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) was broad enough to require arbitration of statutory claims as well as contractual ones, extending a recent line of Court decisions favorable to arbitration.

United States v. Bagley, 473 U.S. 667 (1985), was a Supreme Court of the United States case that established the standard for materiality under Brady v. Maryland.

Article III of the Interstate Agreement on Detainers (Agreement), a congressionally sanctioned interstate compact, establishes a procedure by which a prisoner incarcerated in one State (the sending… Held: Article III does not apply to detainers based on probation-violation charges. Pp. 724-734. (a) The language of the Agreement indicates that Art. III applies solely to detainers based on outstanding criminal charges.

Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife v. Klamath Indian Tribe, 473 U.S. 753 (1985), was a case appealed to the US Supreme Court by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The Supreme Court reversed the previous decisions in the District Court and the Court of Appeals stating that the exclusive right to hunt, fish, and gather roots, berries, and seeds on the lands reserved to the Klamath Tribe by the 1864 Treaty was not intended to survive as a special right to be free of state regulation in the ceded lands that were outside the reservation after the 1901 Agreement.

Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 473 U.S. 788 (1985), was a United States Supreme Court case on the First Amendment and the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC). The court ruled that excluding 'activist' organizations from those eligible to receive donations through the CFC system is not a violation of the First Amendment.

Held: "[I]f the State does prove an aggravating circumstance beyond a reasonable doubt, then unless the jury finds that mitigation exists and outweighs the aggravating circumstance, it can only impose the death penalty." State v. Melson, 638 S.W.2d 342, 366 (Tenn.1982), cert. denied, 459 U.S. 1137 , 103 S.Ct. 770 , 74 L.Ed.2d 983 (1983).

Held: the District Court's ruling was immediately appealable. Dilworth simply does not support this conclusion.

Held: "We believe a reduction made on the grounds of a low award to be error unless the size of the award is the result of the quality of representation." Id., at 235.