New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of military contractors facing a whistle-blower lawsuit and expanded the power of bankruptcy judges to decide claims ordinarily litigated in other federal courts.

MILITARY CONTRACTORS In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that a whistle-blower suit accusing KBR Inc. and Halliburton Company of fraudulent billing had been filed too late.

The suit was brought under the False Claims Act by Benjamin Carter, who had worked for KBR in Iraq in early 2005 as a water-purification operator. The law lets whistle-blowers sue on behalf of the federal government and collect part of any recovery.

Mr. Carter said the companies had billed the government for services they had not performed or had performed improperly.

The statute of limitations is ordinarily six years, but it is shortened to three years if the government should have known about the violation. Mr. Carter filed several suits. He submitted the one at issue in the Supreme Court in June 2011, and most of its accusations came too late under either deadline.

Mr. Carter invoked a federal law that suspends the deadlines in wartime. The court ruled that the exception applies only to criminal charges and not to civil claims like those pursued by Mr. Carter.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the court, said the wartime exception applied to “offenses,” a term “most commonly used to refer to crimes.” Other laws suspending filing deadlines, he said, used broader language when they meant to include civil proceedings.

The Obama administration had urged the court to apply the exception for military conflicts, found in the Wartime Suspension of Limitations Act, to both criminal and civil cases.

In another part of the decision in the case, Kellogg Brown & Root Services v. United States ex rel. Carter, No. 12-1497, Justice Alito rejected an argument by the contractors that Mr. Carter should lose the remaining part of his case, one that involved a timely claim, because another accuser had filed an earlier suit making similar claims.

The False Claims Act bars duplicative suits if earlier ones are pending. The companies argued that pending suits included ones that had been dismissed, a contention Justice Alito rejected.

“Not only does petitioners’ argument push the term ‘pending’ far beyond the breaking point,” he wrote, “but it would lead to strange results that Congress is unlikely to have wanted.”

BANKRUPTCY JUDGES By a 6-to-3 vote, the court ruled that bankruptcy judges may hear claims they are ordinarily powerless to consider if the parties consent. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. filed a sharp dissent, saying that the majority had committed a major constitutional misstep and had allowed a stark violation of the separation of powers.

“The court today declines to resist encroachment by the Legislature,” he wrote. “Instead it holds that a single federal judge, for reasons adequate to him, may assign away our hard-won constitutional birthright so long as two private parties agree.”

Justice Antonin Scalia joined all of the chief justice’s dissent, and Justice Clarence Thomas much of it. Justice Thomas also filed a separate dissent.

The case was a sequel to a 2011 decision, Stern v. Marshall, which struck down a provision of the bankruptcy laws that authorized bankruptcy judges to hear some kinds of claims. Because bankruptcy judges do not have the protections of life tenure guaranteed by Article III of the Constitution, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority in 2011, they may not decide questions only tangentially related to a bankruptcy.

Under a contrary ruling, he wrote, “Article III would be transformed from the guardian of individual liberty and separation of powers we have long recognized into mere wishful thinking.”

The new case, Wellness International Network v. Sharif, No. 13-935, asked whether bankruptcy judges may hear the kinds of claims at issue in Stern if the parties agreed.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the majority, said that “Article III is not violated when the parties knowingly and voluntarily consent to adjudication by a bankruptcy judge.”

She suggested that the chief justice’s dissent was overwrought.

“Adjudication based on litigant consent has been a consistent feature of the federal court system since its inception,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Reaffirming that unremarkable fact, we are confident, poses no great threat to anyone’s birthrights, constitutional or otherwise.”