Petitioner Diana Stevens-Reynolds was the plaintiff-appellant in the proceedings below.

Respondents Wilshire Insurance Company and I A T Insurance Group were the defendants-appellees in the proceedings below.

STATEMENT OF RELATED PROCEEDINGS

United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana:

• Stevens-Reynolds v. Wilshire Insurance Company, et al., No. 2:22-CV-1238 (judgment entered September 19, 2024).

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Should accrual of the limitations period for a claim under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 be subject to the federal fraud-based discovery rule when a plaintiff does not realize that he has been treated differently than other

| employees because the employer misrepresented relevant facts to cloak disparate treatment?

The Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (“CAFRA”) provides that any claimant who “substantially prevails” in a civil forfeiture action “shall” recover attorneys’ fees. 28 U.S.C. 2465(b)(1). But in the twenty-six years since Congress passed CAFRA, this Court has never addressed the scope of its fee-shifting provision. Although it has interpreted the meaning of a distinct term of art—“prevailing party”—in other statutory contexts (see Buckhannon Bd. & Care Home, Inc. v. W. Va. Dep’t of Health & Hum. Res., 5382 U.S. 598 (2001)), it has counseled courts against “adding that term of art to a fee-shifting statute from which it is conspicuously absent.” Hardt v. Reliance Standard Life Ins. Co., 560 U.S. 242, 252 (2010). And just last term, this Court further cabined the application of its “prevailing party” caselaw when it reiterated that “[a] different body of caselaw addresses when a defendant is a ‘prevailing party.” Lackey v. Stinnie, 604 U.S. 192, 204 n.* (2025).

Notwithstanding these admonitions, in the decision below, the Second Circuit joined three other circuits in holding that—even though the phrases are different—CAFRA’s “substantially prevails” language means “prevailing party.” Then, it resolved a question this Court expressly left open in CRST Van Expedited, Inc. v. HEOC, 578 U.S. 419, 434 (2016) and Lackey, by holding that a civil-forfeiture defendant needs a preclusive judgment to be a prevailing party and widened a circuit split on whether the loss of attorneys’ fees constitutes plain legal prejudice requiring mitigation.

The questions presented are:

1. Whether a civil-forfeiture defendant “substantially prevails” under 28 U.S.C. 2465(b)(1) when he or she rebuffs the government by causing it to voluntarily dismiss a

The unconstitutional conditions doctrine forbids the government from conditioning an otherwise avail- able benefit on the surrender of a constitutional right. Over a century’s worth of cases, this Court has inval- idated numerous conditions that exert the kind of in- direct “coercive pressure’ that results when the gov- ernment denies a benefit to a person “because he ex- ercises a constitutional right.” Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Mgmt. Dist., 570 U.S. 595, 604, 607-08 (20138) (citation omitted). In the decision below, the First Circuit recognized that this prohibition on “indi- rect coercion” exists but held it to be a “distinct” First Amendment principle that does not extend to the fun- damental right, recognized in Pierce v. Society of Sis- ters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925), to send one’s children to pri- vate school. On that basis, it upheld an agency’s de- nial of statutorily guaranteed special education ser- vices to children whose parents send them to a private school. Applying rational basis review, it held the de- nial was justified by a state constitutional provision barring public money from “aiding” any “primary or secondary private school. Mass. Const. amend. art. XVIII, § 2.

The question presented 1s:

Does the unconstitutional conditions doctrine ap- ply to the right, recognized in Pierce v. Society of Sis- ters, to send one’s child to a private school?

1. Whether the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is violated when a state workers’ compensation insurer, acting under color of state law, denies a claimant’s valid claim for work-related injury benefits without providing meaningful notice of the basis for denial, an adequate opportunity to be heard before a neutral decisionmaker, or access to the administrative record upon which the denial was based, and when the state courts affirm such denial under a deferential standard of review that forecloses independent examination of the federal constitutional claim.

2. Whether the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is violated when a state workers’ compensation system, as administered and enforced by the insurer and affirmed by the courts of the State of Nevada, treats injured workers who are members of a protected class differently from similarly situated claimants, by subjecting their claims to heightened scrutiny, requiring additional documentation not required of other claimants, and by denying those claims at a disproportionate rate, without a rational basis sufficient to survive even rational-basis review.

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