Last month, a district court in Louisiana handed down an unusual ruling in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) that effectively rendered the law to be unenforceable for any alleged violations committed during a nearly five-year-long span of time.

A district court in Louisiana has rendered an unexpected decision in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) class action that interprets the Supreme Court’s recent Barr v. American Association of Political Callers decision such that it retroactively renders the TCPA unconstitutional from November 2015 until June of this year.

It was a clever lawsuit: suing the government and challenging the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) under the auspices of the First Amendment. The heart of the case—the government-held debt collection exemption is a content-based restriction on speech—will have telemarketers rejoicing: no more TCPA nuisance lawsuits! ”Gentlemen… start your dialers!” Wait… stop… what have we done?

While everybody is still digesting the Supreme Court’s status-quo-maintaining decision in Barr v. AAPC, the court announced that they have granted the petition for writ of certiorari in another case that could have significant consequences for the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).

This is the way Barr v. AAPC ends
This is the way Barr v. AAPC ends
This is the way Barr v. AAPC ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.

The entire telemarketing industry is awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision in AAPC v. Barr, the case that very may well invalidate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in its entirety. However, the possibility that the main federal enforcement mechanism for regulating telemarketing may soon disappear is no reason for marketers to become lax in their compliance efforts.

While everybody waits to see if the government-backed debt exemption leads to the Supreme Court potentially invalidating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) entirely, a district court somewhat surprisingly decided to enforce that same debt exemption.

After a delay due to the COVID-19 crisis, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in a case—William P. Barr, et al. v. American Association of Political Consultants, et al.—that could very well result in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) being ruled unconstitutional. We offer you a summary of these oral arguments based on a reading of several expert analyses.