The qui tam provision of the False Claims Act (FCA) survived a constitutional challenge, for now.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Sept. 1 issued its long-awaited opinion in the case of United States ex rel. Zafirov v. Florida Medical Assocs., LLC, et al., et al. ruling that the qui tam provision of the FCA does not violate the Appointments Clause of Article II of the U.S. Constitution.
The much-anticipated ruling reversed a decision by a federal district court judge in Florida and remanded the case to consider the other constitutional arguments raised by the defendants, including whether the qui tam provision violates the Take Care Clause and the Vesting Clause of Article II. The Eleventh Circuit’s decision matches decisions on the question of the FCA’s qui tam provision’s constitutionality reached by other federal appeals courts in recent years.
This is not the end of the line for constitutional challenges to the qui tam provision, nor potentially for this particular case. Given the genesis of this line of argument in the first place (which came from a dissent by Justice Clarence Thomas in an unrelated case), it is likely that this decision will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, despite the fact that the Eleventh Circuit opinion does not split with other appeals courts. And in the meantime, other challenges are pending to the qui tam provision in other courts of appeals.
We have covered...
Claude and Mistral, AI models developed by US-based Anthropic and French company Mistral AI, respectively, repeated contested or false claims from Kremlin-aligned sites in roughly 70% of answers o...