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Two months ago I wrote about the Seventh Circuit's decision in Steidinger v. Blackstone Medical Services, and I flagged that R.J. Reynolds was pushing a similar argument one step further in a North Carolina federal court, seeking to extend the logic beyond texts to reach cell phones generally. The text message argument just won. The cell phone issue wasn't considered at all.
On September 3, Senior District Judge Catherine Eagles granted Reynolds' motion to dismiss a proposed class action brought by Shawn Card, a North Carolina resident who alleged he received unsolicited marketing texts from the tobacco company from February to April 2026 despite never being a customer and never consenting to contact. Card's number was on the National Do Not Call Registry. He sued under Section 227(c)(5) of the TCPA, the same Do Not Call private right of action at issue in Steidinger.
Reynolds moved to dismiss on two grounds. The first was that Section 227(c)(5) does not cover text messages. The second, argued separately, was that cell phone subscribers like Card do not qualify as "residential telephone" subscribers under the provision, meaning the Do Not Call private right of action would not cover cell phones regardless of whether the contact was a text or a call. Judge Eagles agreed with Reynolds on the first ground and stopped there. Her order expressly declines to reach the residential subscriber argument, since dismissal on the text message ground already resolved the motion.
Judge Eagles' reasoning tracks Steidinger closely, and she is explicit that the case is Seventh Circuit authority. The statute says "telephone call," Congress used broader language elsewhere in the TCPA when it meant to reach text messages, and that contrast signals a narrower meaning here. She also cites McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates v. McKesson, which held that the Hobbs Act does not bind district courts to the FCC's interpretation of the TCPA, freeing courts to read "telephone call" independently rather than deferring to the FCC's 2003 view that it includes texts, and rejects Card's counterarguments largely by pointing to how Steidinger already addressed them. Her order also notes that district courts have split on this question since McLaughlin, with courts in the Northern District of West Virginia and the Southern District of Texas holding that a text message is a "call" under the statute, against courts in the Northern District of Georgia and the Southern District of Indiana reaching the same conclusion Judge Eagles did. This is not a settled question nationally, even at the district court level.
A few points are worth flagging before this gets read as broader than it is.
The cell phone question remains entirely open. Reynolds asked the court to hold that Section 227(c)(5)'s Do Not Call protections do not extend to cell phones at all, which would have been a materially bigger result than Steidinger. Judge Eagles did not touch it, and if that argument succeeds somewhere, it will happen in a different case. This is also a district court order, not binding precedent. It does not bind other North Carolina judges or courts outside the Middle District, and the Fourth Circuit has not weighed in on either question.
Section 227(b) remains completely untouched. That is still the provision governing autodialed and prerecorded calls and texts sent without prior consent, and it is still where the bulk of TCPA exposure lives for companies running SMS or telemarketing programs. Nothing in this order changes what you need to do to get consent before texting or calling a consumer.
For now, if you are defending a subsection (c)(5) claim over unsolicited texts, this order and Steidinger are worth citing, particularly in a jurisdiction where district courts have already lined up the same way. If you are hoping subsection (c) stops covering cell phones generally, that fight has not happened yet. And if your compliance program is built around consent under subsection (b), none of this changes anything.
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