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SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________
No. 18–8369
_________________
ARTHUR J. LOMAX, PETITIONER v. CHRISTINA
ORTIZ-MARQUEZ, et al.
on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the tenth circuit
[June 8, 2020]
Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the
Court.[
1]
To help staunch a “flood of nonmeritorious”
prisoner litigation, the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995
(PLRA) established what has become known as the three-strikes rule.
Jones v.
Bock,
549 U.S.
199, 203 (2007). That rule generally prevents a prisoner from
bringing suit
in forma pauperis (IFP)—that is
,
without first paying the filing fee—if he has had three or more
prior suits “dismissed on the grounds that [they were] frivolous,
malicious, or fail[ed] to state a claim upon which relief may be
granted.” 28 U. S. C. §1915(g). Today we address whether
a suit dismissed for failure to state a claim counts as a strike
when the dismissal was without prejudice. We conclude that it does:
The text of Section 1915(g)’s three-strikes provision refers to any
dismissal for failure to state a claim, whether with prejudice or
without.
I
Petitioner Arthur Lomax is an inmate in a
Colorado prison. He filed this suit against respondent prison
officials to challenge his expulsion from the facility’s
sex-offender treatment program. As is common in prison litigation,
he also moved for IFP status to allow his suit to go forward before
he pays the $400 filing fee. For that motion to succeed, Lomax must
avoid Section 1915(g). That provision bars further IFP litigation
once a prisoner has had at least three prior suits dismissed on
specified grounds.[
2]1 And
Lomax is no rookie litigant. During his time in prison, he has
already brought three unsuccessful legal actions (against various
corrections officers, prosecutors, and judges). If the dispositions
of those cases qualify as strikes under Section 1915(g), Lomax may
not now proceed IFP.
The courts below ruled that Lomax had struck
out. The District Court denied his motion for IFP status, finding
that all three of his prior suits had been dismissed for failure to
state a claim—one of the grounds specified in Section 1915(g). See
App. 65–66.[
3] On appeal, Lomax
argued that two of those dismissals should not count as strikes
because they were without prejudice, thus allowing him to file a
later suit on the same claim. The Court of Appeals for the Tenth
Circuit rejected that argument. Relying on Circuit precedent, the
Court held it “immaterial to the strikes analysis” whether a
dismissal was with or without prejudice. 754 Fed. Appx. 756, 759
(2018) (quoting
Childs v.
Miller, 713 F.3d 1262, 1266
(CA10 2013)).
The Courts of Appeals have long divided over
whether a dismissal without prejudice for failure to state a claim
qualifies as a strike under Section 1915(g).[
4] In line with our duty to call balls and
strikes, we granted certiorari to resolve the split, 589 U. S.
___ (2019), and we now affirm.
II
This case begins, and pretty much ends, with
the text of Section 1915(g). Under that provision, a prisoner
accrues a strike for any action “dismissed on the ground[ ]
that it . . . fails to state a claim upon which
relief may be granted.” That broad language covers all such
dismissals: It applies to those issued both with and without
prejudice to a plaintiff ’s ability to reassert his claim in a
later action.[
5] A strike-call
under Section 1915(g) thus hinges exclusively on the basis for the
dismissal, regardless of the decision’s prejudicial effect. To
reach the opposite result—counting prejudicial orders alone as
strikes—we would have to read the simple word “dismissed” in
Section 1915(g) as “dismissed with prejudice.” But this Court may
not narrow a provision’s reach by inserting words Congress chose to
omit. See,
e.g., Virginia Uranium, Inc. v.
Warren, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (lead opinion of
Gorsuch, J.) (slip op., at 1).
Indeed, to do so would violate yet another rule
of statutory construction: “In all but the most unusual situations,
a single use of a statutory phrase must have a fixed meaning”
across a statute.
Cochise Consultancy, Inc. v.
United
States ex rel. Hunt, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (slip
op., at 5). The PLRA includes three other provisions mentioning
“dismiss[als]” for “fail[ure] to state a claim”—each enabling
courts to dismiss
sua sponte certain prisoner suits on that
ground. §§1915(e)(2)(B)(ii), 1915A(b); 42 U. S. C.
§1997e(c). No one here thinks those provisions deprive courts of
the ability to dismiss those suits without prejudice. See Reply
Brief 15; Brief for Respondents 21–24; Brief for United States as
Amicus Curiae 21–22. Nor would that be a plausible position.
The broad statutory language—on its face covering dismissals both
with and without prejudice—tracks courts’ ordinary authority to
decide whether a dismissal for failure to state a claim should have
preclusive effect. So reading the PLRA’s three-strikes rule to
apply only to dismissals with prejudice would introduce
inconsistencies into the statute. The identical phrase would then
bear different meanings in provisions almost next-door to each
other.
Still, Lomax maintains that the phrase
“dismissed [for] fail[ure] to state a claim” in Section 1915(g) is
a “legal term of art” referring only to dismissals with prejudice.
Reply Brief 4. To support that view, he relies on a procedural rule
used to answer a different question. When a court dismisses a case
for failure to state a claim, but neglects to specify whether the
order is with or without prejudice, how should a later court
determine its preclusive effect? Federal Rule of Civil Procedure
41(b), codifying an old equitable principle, supplies the answer:
It tells courts to treat the dismissal “as an adjudication on the
merits”—meaning a dismissal with prejudice. See
Durant v.
Essex Co., 7 Wall. 107, 109 (1869). According to Lomax,
“Section 1915(g) should be interpreted in light of this legal
backdrop.” Brief for Petitioner 17. He reasons: Because Rule 41(b)
presumes that an order stating only “dismissed for failure to state
a claim” is with prejudice, the same language when used in Section
1915(g) should bear that same meaning. And if so, the provision
would assign a strike to only with-prejudice dismissals for failure
to state a claim.
But that argument gets things backwards. The
Rule 41(b) presumption (like its older equitable counterpart) does
not convert the phrase “dismissed for failure to state a claim”
into a legal term of art meaning “dismissed with prejudice” on that
ground. To the contrary, Rule 41(b) is necessary because that
phrase means only what it says: “dismissed for failure to state a
claim”—whether or not with prejudice. In other words, the phrase’s
indifference to prejudicial effect is what creates the need for a
default rule to determine the import of a dismissal when a court
fails to make that clear. Rule 41(b), then, actually undercuts
Lomax’s position: Its very existence is a form of proof that the
language used in Section 1915(g) covers dismissals both with and
without prejudice. And here too, confirmation of the point comes
from the PLRA’s other provisions referring to “dismiss[als]” for
“fail[ure] to state a claim.” See
supra, at 4. If that
phrase had really become a legal term of art implying “with
prejudice,” then those provisions would prevent courts from
dismissing prisoner suits without prejudice for failure to state a
claim. But Lomax himself does not accept that improbable reading.
See
ibid. His supposed “term of art” is strangely
free-floating, transforming ordinary meaning in one place while
leaving it alone in all others.
Lomax also makes an argument based on the two
other grounds for dismissal listed in Section 1915(g). Recall that
the provision counts as strikes dismissals of actions that are
“frivolous” or “malicious,” along with those that fail to state a
claim. See
supra, at 1, 2, n. 1. In Lomax’s view, the first
two kinds of dismissals “reflect a judicial determination that a
claim is irremediably defective”—that it “cannot succeed and should
not return to court.” Brief for Petitioner 11, 22 (internal
quotation marks omitted). To “harmonize [all] three grounds for
strikes,” he continues, the same must be true of dismissals for
failure to state a claim.
Id., at 23; see
id., at 21
(invoking the “interpretive canon
noscitur a sociis, a word
is known by the company it keeps” (internal quotation marks
omitted)). So Section 1915(g), Lomax concludes, must capture only
the subset of those dismissals that are issued with prejudice—the
ones disposing of “irredeemable” suits.
Id., at 21.
As an initial matter, the very premise of that
argument is mistaken. Contra Lomax’s view, courts can and sometimes
do conclude that frivolous actions are not “irremediably
defective,” and thus dismiss them without prejudice. See,
e.g., Marts v.
Hines,
117 F.3d 1504, 1505 (CA5 1997); see also
Jackson v.
Florida Dept. of Financial Servs., 479 Fed. Appx. 289, 292
(CA11 2012) (similarly if less commonly, dismissing a malicious
action without prejudice). Indeed, this Court has suggested that a
trial court might abuse its discretion by dismissing an IFP suit
with prejudice if “frivolous factual allegations [can] be
remedied through more specific pleading.”
Denton v.
Hernandez,
504 U.S.
25, 34 (1992). So on Lomax’s own metric—whether down the road
the plaintiff ’s claim might return—the dismissals he claims
would be outliers in Section 1915(g) in fact would have company.
And because that is true, his reason for excluding those decisions
from the provision collapses. If dismissals without prejudice for
frivolousness count as a strike under Section 1915(g), then why not
for failure to state a claim too?
Still more fundamentally, Lomax is wrong to
suggest that every dismissed action encompassed in Section 1915(g)
must closely resemble frivolous or malicious ones. The point of the
PLRA, as its terms show, was to cabin not only abusive but also
simply meritless prisoner suits. Before the PLRA, the statute
governing IFP claims targeted frivolous and malicious actions, but
no others. See
Neitzke v.
Williams,
490 U.S.
319, 328 (1989). In the PLRA, Congress chose to go
further—precisely by aiming as well at actions that failed to state
a claim. The theory was that a “flood of nonmeritorious claims,”
even if not in any way abusive, was “effectively preclud[ing]
consideration of ” suits more likely to succeed.
Jones,
549 U. S., at 203. So we cannot, in the interest of
“harmonization,” interpret the phrase “failure to state a claim”
based on the pre-existing terms “frivolous” and “malicious.” Cf.
Babbitt v.
Sweet Home Chapter, Communities for Great
Ore.,
515 U.S.
687, 702, 705 (1995) (rejecting use of the
noscitur
canon when “the Senate went out of its way to add” a “broad word”
to a statute). That would defeat the PLRA’s
expansion of the
statute beyond what was already there.
III
The text of the PLRA’s three-strikes provision
makes this case an easy call. A dismissal of a suit for failure to
state a claim counts as a strike, whether or not with prejudice. We
therefore affirm the judgment below.
It is so ordered.
