As its name suggests, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of
1991 ("TCPA") was drafted, debated, passed, and signed
into law well before cell phones became ubiquitous. It is,
therefore, unsurprising that the statutory language of the TCPA
does not expressly state whether the law applies to text messages.
This was a subject of great interest in recent oral arguments
before the United States Supreme Court ("SCOTUS") in Facebook v.
Duguid ("Facebook"). In
Facebook, several of SCOTUS's textualist Justices
wondered aloud whether the TCPA could or should apply to text
messages, when the statute does not even mention them.
What was the Crux of the Justices' Questions?
Textual Limits of the TCPA
