August 2026 Docket Review
This month, the Court issued 5 precedential opinions and 6 grants of allocatur.
On the opinion side, I’m most interested in Esch, less for its holding and more for its signal about the Court’s approach to statutory interpretation cases. In Esch, a school teacher in Arizona left the state and her erstwhile retirement account there to come to Pennsylvania and teach. She collected her accrued benefits, including employer contributions, in a lump sum, and wanted to use those funds to purchase service credit toward a Pennsylvania public school employee retirement. Generally, public employee systems bar this type of compound recovery. But Pennsylvania’s statute is phrased in terms of barring those currently receiving benefits from a similar employer or entitled to receive benefits from another similar employer in the future from purchasing service credit. That language does not include teachers like Esch who already received those benefits. Thus, there is arguably a disjunct between purpose and text here. In an opinion authored by Justice Wecht, the Court put its lot in with the text, holding the statute allowed Ms. Esch to purchase the service credit. The Court indicated it would “begin and end [its] analysis with the text,” regardless of what earlier caselaw hypothesized as its purpose, and even though it admitted its decision created “somewhat of a loophole.” It went so far as to call “the reasoning behind the Legislature’s curious choice” “irrelevant.”
The opinion is the latest in a series of similar decisions taking something of a textualist hardline, legislative intent and consequences notwithstanding. I’m thinking of last November’s Coleman decision, in which the Court indicated it was unwilling to read away a poorly drafted provision of the Sunshine Law that considerably undermined its goals of local government transparency. (A series of earlier decisions also rolled back the degree to which the Court is willing to ignore text on the basis of so-called “absurdity.”) Also, the Court’s opinion in Esch was unanimous, whereas Coleman was not, indicating that the Court may be coalescing around this interpretive structure.
Some might consider that a too-crabbed view of the Court’s role. For my part, I think that view impoverishes what the Court is doing. At a theoretical level, it’s important to distinguish legislators’ intent from Legislative intent. Whatever individual members, or sponsorship memoranda, or press releases, or floor statements might say about what legislators want to accomplish, the Legislature expresses its intent through its words. Just as important, taking the Legislature at its word keeps political incentives where they belong. The Legislature is responsible for the words it uses. When the words are capable of only one reasonable meaning, the court is not in the business of changing the law for the sake of policy. That is precisely the Legislature’s job. And it is likewise not in the business of seeking credit (no pun intended) for “good” outcomes or blame for “bad” ones. That is the Legislature’s job, too. This is particularly appropriate in times, like these, where it feels like every inch of legal ground is the product of a pitched political battle. And downstream, insisting that the Legislature use its words promotes good drafting and better-reasoned decisions. After all, if the sin is bad drafting, the only real penitence is better drafting.
Additionally, in Khalil, the Court offers an important practice, or at least calendaring, note: collateral-order appeals as of right must be filed within 30 days, or else wait until final judgment. Of course, a collateral order is one that involves a separable and important issue implicating major public policies that awaiting final judgment will render essentially nugatory. So one wonders whether most will survive to final judgment in the end. But the point here is that just because you can appeal a interlocutory order doesn’t mean you can sit on your rights and appeal it any old time.
Finally, on the allocatur side, I’m most interested in Estate of Tratthen. The Court’s grant of allocatur is one of many in recent memory in which it is delving into causation standards whether under statutes or the common law. Of course, there conceptions of causation that go back millenia, and, of course, the Legislature might select any of them in any particular context, but all else being equal and left to its own devices, this Court has for the better part of a century hewed to a relatively modern conception of causal factors as nonexclusive and interrelated substantial factors. It will be interesting to see how and why the court does or doesn’t do that in Tratthen.
Precedential Opinions
Galette v. NJ Transit, 4 EAP 2024 (remanding case involving interstate sovereign immunity following United States Supreme Court review)
Khalil v. Mary Jane Homes Enrichment Ctr., Inc., 16 EAP 2025 (Opinion by Donohue, J.) (holding a party must file a collateral order appeal within 30 days)
Commonwealth v. Perez, 818 CAP (Opinion by Mundy, J.) (reversing a trial court’s grant of relief in a death-penalty PCRA case )
See also Concurring Opinion by Wecht, J.
See also Concurring Opinion by McCaffery, J.
Esch v. Pa. Pub. Sch. Retirement Bd., 13 WAP 2025 (Opinion by Wecht, J.) (holding a public school employee can purchase retirement service credit for out-of-state service notwithstanding receipt of a lump-sum retirement benefit in connection with that service )
Commonwealth v. Wilson, 6 WAP 2025 (Opinion by Mundy, J.) (holding statutory drug-overdose-response immunity did not apply to an officer’s subsequent inventory search the user’s vehicle)
See also Concurring Opinion by Wecht, J.
See also Dissenting Opinion by Donohue, J.
Allocatur Grants
Commonwealth v. Hines, 63 MAL 2026 (granting review to consider whether an individual’s consent to search the curtilage of a home extends to a protective sweep of the residence)
Estate of Tratthen v. Dept. of Gen. Servs., 119 MAL 2026 (granting review to consider the causation standard of the Emergency and Law Enforcement Personnel Death Benefits Act)
Commonwealth v. Nole, 82 MAL 2026 (granting review to consider the propriety of cross-examination regarding a criminal defendant’s post-arrest, post-Miranda silence)
In re: Condemnation by the Gen. Muni. Auth. of the City of Nanticoke, 131 MAL 2026 (granting review to consider the validity of a taking for third-party development under several statutes)
Sabree v. Small Bus. Advocate, 722 MAL 2025 (granting review to consider the validity of a Public-Utility-Commission rule with respect to a wastewater cost subsidy)
Cnty. of Lancaster v. AFSCME Dist. Council 89, 173 MAL 2026 (granting review to consider whether the Public Employe Relations Act requires impact bargaining and whether an impasse in negotiations occurred)
