Few legal developments sound more sleep-inducing than “changes to federal rulemaking authority.” But don’t mistake dullness for a lack of impact: a pair of Supreme Court decisions just issued will arguably have the single greatest impact on employment law in decades.
This sea change comes in two parts. Many readers will already be familiar with the groundbreaking Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc. v. Raimondo decision, which threw out the Court’s long-standing “Chevron deference” doctrine. Chevron required courts to pay special deference to a federal administrative agency’s interpretation of applicable law within its enforcement purview on the theory that an agency specializing in, say, environmental regulation has a special expertise in the environmental laws it enforces. That rule is gone: now, the agency might be right, but so might be any other litigant opposing it.
The real “sleeper,” however, is actually the combined effect of Loper and another decision, SEC v. Jarkesy, issued by the Court just before Loper. In Jarkesy, the Supreme Court held that when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seeks civil penalties against a defendant in a securities enforcement action, the Seventh Amendment entitles a defendant to a jury trial: it must bring the case in federal court as opposed to before administrative law judges in the SEC’s in-house forum. While Jarskey applies on its face only to the SEC and the particular enforcement proceeding at issue in that case, there is no...
The Trump administration’s fraud prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center is set for arraignment on Thursday afternoon. Ahead of the scheduled court appearance in Alabama, defense lawyers fo...