ARGUMENT ANALYSIS
By Ronald Mann
on 14 January 2025
at 7:57 p.m
The court heard Waetzig v. Halliburton Energy Services on Tuesday. (Anthony Quintano via Flickr)
Tuesday’s argument i Waetzig v. Halliburton Energy Services was short and relaxed. At issue in the case is the standard for allowing a plaintiff to reopen a case he voluntarily dismissed a few years earlier, and the justices did not appear to find the case moot.
Vincent Levy represented Gary Waetzig, the former Halliburton employee who is trying to renew his age discrimination lawsuit against the energy company. Almost half of his presentation was consumed by a barrage of questions from Chief Justice John Roberts designed to get Levy to admit that the only reason he wants to use Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b) to reopen the lawsuit he had previously dismissed. is because the statute of limitations would prevent Waetzig from filing a new case now. It took Roberts 10 separate questions to elicit this admission!
The main substantive debate in which the justices engaged was whether the voluntary dismissal of the original case was the kind of “final” proceeding to which Rule 60(b) would apply. Levy argued that the ruling was final, arguing that the limitation to “final” decisions was intended to preclude interlocutory decisions in an “open, pending” case.
Justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson asked several questions about that point and appeared to take it seriously. Jackson directly asked Matthew McGill, representing Halliburton, if he could address Levy’s narrative on the matter. McGill predictably read the story differently, but the judges pushed him so little that it’s hard to tell how much they accepted what he had to say.
The main thing I got out of the argument is that the judges seem very motivated to decide the question presented. McGill’s brief argued that a jurisdictional issue (based on the court’s decision in Badgerow v. Walters) separately reasoned the rejection of Waetzig’s case. That argument is probably strong, as Justice Elena Kagan (the author of Badgerow) Levy commented that, in her opinion, he “ha[s] a tough row to pick on Badgerow question,” but she seemed just as keen to skip over that issue in this case. In conversation with McGill, Kagan said she “likes[s] Badgerow as well as the next person,” but that “it’s just not the time to talk about it now,” because “it’s not what’s in front of us.”
The argument was pretty short (just under 50 minutes) and most of the judges didn’t say anything substantive, so it’s pretty hard to predict how they’re going to rule this one. However, I don’t think they will find this complicated. My guess is that we will get an answer before the end of April.