Page:Axon Enterprise v. FTC.pdf/14

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Cite as: 598 U. S. ____ (2023)
9

Opinion of the Court

the district court to lack jurisdiction over those claims, and thus directed the company back to the statutory review scheme. The Commission, we emphasized, had “extensive experience” in addressing the statutory issues raised, and could resolve them in ways that “brought to bear” its “expertise” over the mining industry. 510 U. S., at 214–215; see Free Enterprise Fund, 561 U. S., at 491. All that was less so, we acknowledged, of the company’s constitutional challenge; but that claim could be “meaningfully addressed in the Court of Appeals.” 510 U. S., at 215.

We applied similar reasoning in Elgin. The statutory review scheme there directed federal employees challenging discharge decisions to seek review in the MSPB and then, if needed, in the Federal Circuit (a specific court of appeals). But Elgin filed suit in district court when he was fired by the government for failing to register for the draft. We held that the court lacked jurisdiction even though Elgin mainly claimed that the draft law, in excluding women, violated the Equal Protection Clause. Although the MSPB might not be able to hold the draft law unconstitutional, we stated, the Court of Appeals could—and that was sufficient to ensure “meaningful review” of Elgin’s claim. 567 U. S., at 21. Still more, Elgin’s claim was neither collateral to the MSPB’s ordinary proceedings nor unrelated to its expertise. We reasoned that a “challenge to [a discharge] is precisely the type of personnel action regularly adjudicated by the MSPB.” Id., at 22. And we observed that such an action could involve “threshold” and other “questions unique to the employment context” that “fall[] squarely within the MSPB’s expertise.” Id., at 22–23.

But in Free Enterprise Fund, this Court went the opposite way, holding that certain claims landed outside a statutory review scheme. The scheme was the Exchange Act’s—the same as in Cochran’s case. And the main claim in Free Enterprise Fund bears more than a passing resemblance to one Axon and Cochran raise: It, too, alleged that officials with