Helen L. RUCKER, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Shirley S. CHATER, Commissioner of Social Security, Defendant-Appellee

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that collateral estoppel was not applicable because the subsequent application for benefits involved a different time period and a different record
• concluding a prior ALJ’s finding had “no effect . . . on an application for a subsequent time period”
• stating that this Court is not “required to give full credit to every statement of pain, and require a finding of disabled every time a claimant states that she feels unable to work”
• finding four years between the two claims to be too long for the first ALJ’s findings to be relevant
• rejecting the argument that the “first ALJ’s findings established” the claimant’s “maximum” RFC “at that time and forever more” because the first RFC finding—though binding for the time period of the first application—was “not conclusive evidence of” the claimant’s RFC “at a later date”
• “Section 405(h) is designed to prevent relitigation of issues that prior suits have already decided.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).