Trackwell v. United States Government, 2007 WL 30035 (1/5/07) - A federal district court did not have authority under the mandamus statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1361, to order the Supreme Court Clerk or the S.Ct. itself to do anything. The plaintiff wanted the S.Ct. to consider his application challenging the constitutionality of the Iraq War.

Oxfam cites the following as grounds for relief: The Administrative Procedure Act (5 U.S.C. § 706(1)) provides a remedy to “compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed.” The federal mandamus statute (28 U.S.C. § 1361) gives a federal district court jurisdiction to compel an agency of the United States to perform a nondiscretionary duty owed to a plaintiff as a matter of law. Among other things, Oxfam claims it is directly injured (read as “we have standing”) because the information disclosed pursuant to Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act would be of direct value to Oxfam America, both as a shareholder and as an organization with a mission to advance accountability in the management of extractive resource revenues around the world.

Section 706(1) (5 U.S.C. § 706(1)) provides that a reviewing court shall “compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed”. The federal mandamus statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1361, vests the U.S. District Courts with original jurisction “to compel an officer or employee of the United States or any agency thereof to perform a duty owed to the plaintiff.” Last year, Oxfam America relied on both of these statutes in its lawsuit against the SEC for failing to meet the deadline for adopting disclosure rules for resource extraction issuers mandated by Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act.

FDA’s unreasonable delay is in part due to its inability to locate an inspectional report that the agency should have long-since created and reviewed. By failing to provide this compliance confirmation, Defendants are depriving Apotex of its right to have two pending ANDAs treated the same way that FDA has treated several other, similarly situated ANDAs.Apotex’s two-count Complaint alleges that FDA’s actions violate the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) “because those actions have denied Apotex approval for ANDAs 201505 and 200832 for no reason other than FDA’s inability to process necessary paperwork” (5 U.S.C. § 706), and that “FDA owed Apotex a specific duty to approve those ANDAs when 180-day exclusivity expired” (28 U.S.C. § 1361, mandamus). Apotex seeks, among other things, an interim order directing the Office of Compliance to immediately issue a compliance recommendation to OGD for ANDA Nos. 201505 and 200832, and an orANDAs.