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\"7 The court also applied the two-step Chevron framework, asking whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question at issue and, if not, whether the agency's answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.8 FCC'S GUIDANCE ON DEFINITION OF ATDS VACATED Section 227(b)(1)(A) of the TCPA makes it unlawful for any person within the United States to \"make any call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using any automatic telephone dialing system . . . (iii) to any telephone number assigned to a . . . cellular telephone service. FCC'S TREATMENT OF REASSIGNED NUMBERS IS VACATED The treatment of reassigned numbers under the TCPA has perplexed litigants for years.19 \"It is estimated that as many as thirty-seven million phone numbers are recycled and transferred to a different cell phone user each year,\" and many businesses have inevitably placed telephone calls or sent text messages to reassigned numbers, leading to a rise in individual and class action lawsuits.20 Under the TCPA, it is unlawful to make an ATDS or prerecorded voice call to a cell phone without the \"prior express consent of the called party. \"27 Citing favorably to the Seventh Circuit's analysis in Soppet v. Enhanced Recovery Co.,28 the ACA International court agreed that the FCC was not \"compelled\" to interpret \"called party\" to mean the \"intended recipient\" rather than the current subscriber.29 However, the D.C. Circuit nonetheless invalidated the 2015 Ruling's treatment of reassigned numbers, finding the one-call safe harbor to be arbitrary.30 The court noted that the FCC's \"reasonable reliance\" approach to prior express consent was not necessarily consistent with the one-call safe harbor, asking: \"why does a caller's reasonable reliance on a previous subscriber's consent necessarily cease to be reasonable once there has been a single, post-reassignment call?\"31 Troubled that the FCC did not believe callers could successfully identify reassigned numbers with existing technology, the court found the FCC failed to provide a reasonable explanation for why the safe harbor stopped \"at the seemingly arbitrary point of a single call or message. [...]regulations promulgated in 2003 (\"2003 Ruling\") interpreted the term to include \"predictive dialers,\" meaning \"equipment that dials numbers and, when certain computer software is attached, also assists telemarketers in predicting when a sales agent will be available to take calls.

\"16 The plaintiff provided his cellular telephone number on the lease application.17 While finding that the plaintiffs evidence created a disputed issue of fact as to whether he revoked consent to be called,18 the Second Circuit nonetheless affirmed the trial court's grant of summary judgment in favor of the defendant finance company, holding that the contractual consent provision prevented the plaintiff from unilaterally revoking consent as a matter of law.19 The court explained that consent \"is not always revocable under the common law,\" noting that \"[a] distinction in this regard must be drawn between tort and contract law. \"38 However, in Daubert v. NRA Group, LLC,39 a case involving the question of consent provided through an intermediary, the Third Circuit held that a patient did not give prior express consent to receive collection calls from a hospital's debt collector merely by providing his telephone number to the hospital.40 The court noted that the TCPA analysis \"turns on whether the called party granted permission or authorization\" to be called, and that someone could provide prior express consent to receive calls from a hospital's debt collector by affirmatively giving the hospital permission to transfer his or her phone number to a third party for billing purposes.41 The record before the court simply showed, at most, that the plaintiff had given his cell number to the hospital when he was admitted, and contained no evidence of whether the plaintiff consented, on the hospital intake form or elsewhere, to have his number transferred to a third party for billing or other purposes.42 The Daubert court held that \"more is required to show a genuine dispute on prior express consent,\" and affirmed the lower court's grant of summary judgment in favor of the plaintiff on his TCPA claim.43 In Lawrence v. Bayview Loan Servicing, LLC,44 the Eleventh Circuit held that a consumer provided prior express consent to be called by his mortgage servicer by providing his cell phone number on an application for a loan modification that he submitted to the prior servicer of his mortgage.45 The court further held that, even if the consumer orally revoked consent during conversations with the new mortgage servicer, consent was reinstated when the consumer repeatedly furnished his cell phone number, without limiting instructions, in written communications with the servicer.46 The court rejected the consumer's assertion that, because all of the written communications concerned the topic of homeowner's insurance, consent should have been limited to calls related to that topic, noting that, \"even if Lawrence did not intend to consent in fact to calls placed by an ATDS system, he nevertheless provided apparent consent by repeatedly providing his cell phone number to Bayview without qualification. The proposed class consisted of all persons to whose residential telephone lines the defendant initiated a call that left a prerecorded message.67 The plaintiff proposed to identify class members by soliciting individual affidavits certifying receipt of the prerecorded call along with phone bills showing that the putative class member subscribed to New York City residential telephone service during the relevant time period.68 The district court found the proposed class unascertainable because no list of the called numbers existed and the proposed class members could not realistically be expected to recall a brief phone call received six years earlier.69 While noting that a list of class members is not always necessary to render a class ascertainable, the Second Circuit found no abuse of discretion in the district court's conclusion that the plaintiff had failed to show a sufficiently reliable method for identifying class members who actually received the prerecorded call at issue.70 Likewise, in Sandusky Wellness Center, LLC v. ASD Specialty Healthcare, Inc.,71 the Sixth Circuit held that a proposed TCPA class was properly denied class certification because, among other reasons, the class was not ascertainable. [...]given the large number of pending TCPA cases, courts will continue to interpret vague statutory and regulatory provisions like \"any reasonable means\" of revocation. 1.

Introduction In the wake of the Federal Communications Commission's (\"FCCs\") comprehensive 2015 Declaratory Ruling and Order (\"2015 Ruling\"),1 which addressed numerous questions of interpretation under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (\"TCPA\"),2 creditors and debt collectors have struggled with how to comply with the statute while still effectively communicating with their customers and debtors.3 While fending off an ever-increasing number of TCPA lawsuits,4 numerous corporations and industry groups, hoping to set aside key aspects of the 2015 Ruling, challenged it in the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the District of Columbia and Seventh Circuits5 as an unreasonable exercise of agency power.6 Meanwhile, federal courts issued inconsistent opinions addressing not only the substantive bedrocks of the statute-prior express consent and revocation7-but also procedural issues, such as standing and class action certification.8 Legal Challenges to the 2015 Ruling In response to the 2015 Ruling, the consumer credit industry-which had unsuccessfully petitioned the FCC for exemptions for debt collection calls to wireless numbers9-bolted to action. On July 10, 2015, the same day that the FCC released the 2015 Ruling, ACA International-the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals (\"ACA\")-petitioned the D.C. Circuit to review the 2015 Ruling.10 ACAs case was consolidated with eight other petitions for review.11 The joint petitioners argued that: the 2015 Ruling's definition of an \"automatic telephone dialing system\" as having the present or potential capacity \"to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator, and to dial such numbers\"12 contradicts the ordinary meaning and...

Background: Conservation decisions not only impact wildlife, habitat, and environmental health, but also human wellbeing and social justice. The inclusion of safeguards and equity considerations in the conservation field has increasingly garnered attention in international policy processes and amongst conservation practitioners. Yet, what constitutes an 'equitable' solution can take many forms, and how the concept is treated within conservation research is not standardized. This review explores how social equity is conceptualized and assessed in conservation research. Methods/Design: Using a structured search and screening process, we identified 138 peer-reviewed studies that addressed equity in relation to conservation actions. The authors developed a coding framework to guide the review process, focusing on the current state of, definitions used for, and means of assessing social equity in empirical conservation research. Review Results: Results show that empirical research on social equity in conservation is rapidly growing, with the majority of studies on the topic published only since 2009. Equity within conservation research is skewed toward distributional concerns and to a lesser extent procedural issues, with recognition and contextual equity receiving little attention. Studies are primarily situated in forested biomes of the Global South. Conservation interventions mostly resulted in mixed or negative impacts on equity. Synthesis and Discussion: Our results demonstrate the current limitations of research on equity in conservation, and raise challenging questions about the social impacts of conservation and how to ameliorate equity concerns. Framing of equity within conservation research would benefit from greater transparency of study motivation, more explicit definition of how equity is used within the study context, and consideration for how best to assess it. We recommend that the empirical conservation literature more deeply engage with different notions of equity when studying, planning, and implementing actions to address potential trade-offs among equity and conservation objectives and beneficiaries.