Supreme Court Remands Texas Credit Card Surcharge Case

Courts U.S. Supreme Court State Issues Consumer Finance Payment Processors Credit Cards

On April 3, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in a case challenging a Texas law that bars retailers from imposing credit card surcharges, and remanded the case to the Fifth Circuit in light of its ruling last week in Expressions Hair Design, that a similar statute in New York regulated merchants’ First Amendment rights. In Rowell, a landscaping business, a computer networking company, a self-storage facility, and an event design and production company sought to challenge a Texas law allowing merchants to charge different prices to customers who pay with cash and customers who pay with a credit card, but barring merchants from describing the price difference as a surcharge for credit cards, leaving them to describe it instead as a discount for using cash. The Fifth Circuit held that the Texas law did not violate the retailers’ free speech rights, aligning it with the Second Circuit in its September 2015 ruling in the Expressions Hair Design litigation against New York State.

As previously reported on InfoBytes, the Supreme Court last week in the Expressions case unanimously rejected the Second Circuit’s conclusion that the New York credit card law regulates conduct alone, rather than speech. As explained in the Supreme Court’s opinion, the law at issue “is not like a typical price regulation,” which regulates a seller’s conduct by dictating how much to charge for an item. Rather, the Court explained, the law regulates “how sellers may communicate their prices.” (emphasis added). The Supreme Court, however, did not address the question of whether the law unconstitutionally restricts speech.