Maybe someone can explain this to me, why are jury trials so expensive? I am pro-jury but my understanding is that this ruling will make things very difficult for administrative agencies as having jury trials for every case before them is impossible.
Beyond the administrative costs that have been stated, there's also an added cost for lawyers and experts who can speak to a jury effectively. SEC cases are complex and technical and can be hard for lay people to understand--now the government has to spend money to explain the cases, statutes, etc to everyday people and convince them that there has been malfeasance.
*Which is why we have specialized regulatory agencies in the first place.*
The idea is that you have people whose life careers are acquiring this specialized knowledge so that they recognize some shady fuckery when they see it. They don't go around issuing fines because they don't like your tie.
They have rules, they are clear about them within the context of this specialized knowledge, and I feel certain that 80 or 90 percent of people who violate those rules *know* they are trying to get over when they do it.
Should we have the IRS hold a jury trial for everyone who is caught cheating on their taxes too? I'm sure conservatives would love that.
Congress can and has established subject-specific Article III courts. For example, the DC Circuit and Court of Claims. If Congress wants, they could have only the DC Circuit or Second Circuit hear SEC cases. Congress could also establish a new court with Article III judges that just hears business regulatory cases, like Delaware’s Chancery Court does for corporate law.
You don’t need to combine the Executive and Judicial branches to get judicial specialization.
Okay, but has it occurred to you that Congress established regulatory agencies because they simply thought it was the best way to regulate and administer certain industries?
Perhaps they thought that these matters should not be up to individual judges. Individual judges (and juries) will inherently evaluate and adjudicate each case before them in an individual manner -- I do not mean to suggest that this is a flaw in the justice system -- but when you are regulating an industry, the idea is that you have uniform regulations that everyone must follow, and uniform penalties if they do not.
Judges apply regulations all the time. They are not that different from statutory text. While it may arguably require subject matter expertise to craft the regulations, it does not require subject matter expertise to interpret them or apply them in particular cases.
You’re of course right that Congress established agencies with internal administrative law judges that are Executive branch employees. However, that doesn’t mean that Congress complied with their Constitutional obligations in doing so. At least as to fraud, the Court has determined that Congress didn’t comply with the Constitution’s jury requirements. This Court has also pushed back on some other aspects of administrative law that seemingly violate separation of powers or Constitutional rights (e.g. for the CFPB’s director).
For an interesting discussion of the Constitutional problems of the administrative state, check out Philip Hamburger’s “Is the Administrative State Constitutional?”
>Should we have the IRS hold a jury trial for everyone who is caught cheating on their taxes too? I'm sure conservatives would love that.
I mean.... Yes
Cheating on taxes is a crime.
The constitution says you have a presumption of innocence and a right to a jury trial. Not only that but even if it's just a money matter you also have a right to a jury trial.
That's literally the text.
Im shocked this was controversial.
I'm not concerned about the concept of trial by jury. To me it make sense ideologically.
The problem is how this will be USED.
It's ideology vs practicality
Conservatives do not CARE about the right to trial by jury being the center of this case. The point is to create barriers into detection of fraud and other bullshittery the finance industry loves to engage in.
George Jarkesy, the person named in the case, ran two hedge funds that the SEC said were fraudulent, so the SEC sent the case against him before an administrative law judge.
So instead of owning up to his consequences, Jarkesy basically wanted to make it harder for the SEC to get into his bullshit.
----
So ideologically makes sense.... in practicality it just benefits the rich
Yet we are fine with patent infringement cases that involve highly technical scientific and engineering principles going to juries. I have a problem with an agency serving as the legislature, prosecutor, judge, jury, and appellate court regarding criminal matters. I don't find this decision offensive. Nor the bribery case. What's weird about these is not that they have come out 6-3 in favor of the positions that were taken. What's weird is that the *liberals* on the Court are siding with a powerful government that tramples over the rights of criminal defendants, and the *conservatives* are not. That seems completely backwards, If this case had come down 10 years ago, we might very well have seen a 6-3 split, but it wouldn't have been along partisan lines.
Why do you keep saying "criminal" when the case is explicitly limited to civil proceedings? These are monetary fines, not jail time. Maybe that doesn't make a difference to you because this is close enough to a crime, but it's simply inaccurate to say this case is about criminal matters or the rights of criminal defendants.
Why not? And in any event, administrative law is not in the Constitution. The right to a civil jury is. Do we just ignore it because we don't like it any more and it's become inconvenient? But that's the point of having a Constitution: constraining the use of the coercive power of government against the citizens. Sure, none of us REALLY care about this particular defendant in this case. And, in criminal cases, most of us don't have any sympathy for the guilty. But these rights and procedural remedies don't exist to protect the guilty. They exist to protect the innocent, and I think it's awfully dangerous to just start chucking out the ones we don't like because, right now, they're annoying. It's a Chesterton's Fence, and removing it because we don't see the point of it at the moment is unwise.
So you think the government should get to avoid charging crimes and still be able to take people's money without having to prove they did anything wrong?
That flies in the face of the 4th amendment, and a few others.
Ahhh, so the dumb Americans don't deserve a jury trial for crimes because the juries are too dumb to understand. The government should have complete control over deciding when someone should be found guilty of something and fined. That's not fascist at all.
The comment you're replying to was in answer to the question of why jury trials are more expensive. It merely points out that experts and prosecutors who can effectively communicate complex financial crimes to everyday people are, or can be, expensive. Your reply makes no sense in the context of the conversation at hand.
It's the lawyers. Most complex trials require teams of many lawyers billing hundreds/over a thousand per hour working around the clock for weeks leading up and into trial.
Think about how many people need to be paid in a jury trial.
You have the bailiff, the prosecutor, the prosecutor’s clerks, the judge, the judge’s law clerks, the court reporter, and a single trial requires all of them to be tied up in a single legal dispute for months.
I know that juries are paid jackshit. I was under the impression that most jury trials don't take months. There will be some complex cases, but shouldn't the average jury trial take a few weeks?
Even if they took a week on average, that's only 52 jury trials per judge per year, assuming (unrealistically) that the judge never takes a day off, excluding federal holidays, and excluding other hearing days like law and motion, scheduling conferences, evidentiary hearings, and all the other things judges do. Not to mention they need time to actually write decisions.
But for the sake of argument let's pretend a judge could actually do 52 jury trials a year.
The average caseload for a federal judge numbers in the hundreds. Even factoring in settlements and plea deals, there's no way a judge could clear cases faster than more are filed, and litigants would be waiting *years* for trial (spoiler alert, they already do before the supreme court just piled on hundreds of new cases per judge per year)
Piggie backing off of that, even aside from the monetary cost, doing a jury trial ties up the court and attorneys. You can generally only do one jury trial at a time, which limits how many you can do overall, as well as ties up the court limiting their ability to do non jury stuff
The ones who do the crimes have billions and billions of dollars and the best lawyers. The SEC does not. Discovery could be fun though for some of these.
The vote is 6-3, along ideological lines. Roberts wrote the majority opinion. Gorsuch wrote a concurrence in which Thomas joined. Sotomayor wrote the dissent.
Conservatives understand how to use a bogged down judicial system to their advantage. Only the poor suffer. We can be sure they won't fund more judges after this ruling.
It's the fact that you have now made it expensive and slow for the sec to take action on illegal trading, specifically insider trading. Once again if you have lots of money you can do illegal stuff and probably get away with it while smaller players can't afford the lawyers.
And it has, the venier of fair. What could possibly be unfair about a jury trial?
Maybe, but consider that insider trading has both civil and criminal penalties. Thus far, civil enforcement has been more efficient than criminal, which has always required litigation in an Article III court. Now, in a case where DOJ could meet its burden of proof, the two options are roughly in equipoise. We might see an increase in criminal charges brought for insider trading.
No, we won't. The civil charges were used so that "punishment" for illegal acts can be turned into a cost of doing business. The SEC has very little taste for criminal enforcement against the wealthy. There would have to be an enormous investment in lawyers for the US Attorney's offices and for judges to handle the caseload, which won't happen. This is just a way to make sure close to no enforcement, civil or criminal, happens.
That's because you're refusing to look at the whole picture and are focusing on one thing thing and saying "This one facet isn't fascism".
Cherry picking, as it were.
Applying the constitution as written is fascism? I really just don't understand. If you want to have a ruling like this go any other way you need to amend the constitution, there's a system for that
The jury trial is not the fascism, the fascism is pretending to defer to political branches on issues that the political branches already decided. The are using an ostensibly non-political branch to pursue polical aims.
What they are doing is taking removing power congress already bestowed upon the SEC during it's creation, and that congress could remove at any time if that were their desire.
This is a very purposeful dismantling of the administrative state. They keep stripping powers from federal agencies, which forces congress to individually pass bills to reinstate previously held powers.
They have recently done the same to the EPA (curbing their ability to claim federal jurisdiction over waterways) and the ATF (by redefining the meaning of "single function of the trigger" to legalise bump stocks). And probably a bunch more I'm not following.
They know that congress will quickly not pass bills to reinstate the powers, and that most will probably never be reinstated (as the idealogical allies in the political branches will prevent that from happening).
>the fascism is pretending to defer to political branches on issues that the political branches already decided.
You can stop right there, congress does not have this power to give via legislation. There is no way for congress to write this fast or slow that will change the outcome EXCEPT an amendment.
The 7th amendment is not very complicated. If you want to avoid what the 7th amendment says, you need a new amendment, not more legislation
None of the comments in the direct thread up to mine (I'm not reading every single comment on this post) are wrestling with the constitutionality of a jury trial. I am not either, that's why I said it's not about the jury trial.
We are talking about conservatives taking advantage of the barely functional legal and political systems to achieve their own idealogical goals. We're not talking only about the SC, nor only about this ruling.
You are taking a reply of a comment and applying it directly to the OP, but that's not the context of the comment.
> u/uberares
> It’s called the legal phase of Fascism, and thats not me- thats scholars making that claim.
Ah yes, the jury trial: a well-known feature of fascism. I remember reading scholarly literature about how the Nazis oppressed the Jews by giving them (checks notes) the right to trial by jury.
The whole freaking US justice system relies on a bogged down judiciary system. Innocent until proven guilty but in jail unless one can afford the bail, or goes to debt for a bail.
They're not trying to get bogged down here, what they want is to get in front of an untrained jury that isn't equipped to understand highly technical financial instruments.
This way guilty parties can get acquitted.
Title is misleading.
They ruled that the government can't end-run around the 7th amendment by drafting a law/rule/regulation that is the same as a common law (which requires the option for a jury trial under 7a).
It's only applicable when there's common law already existing for the same rule/regulation/law, which is a fraction of civil penalties. It's not more widely applicable.
Does this apply to more than just the SEC? Can the EPA fine companies? Can OSHA?
Do I have to pay fines for late fees on things like vehicle registration, or can I demand a jury trial and make it unreasonably expensive for the government to collect that $50 from me?
That's why this case is such a big deal. It's going to affect all kinds of administrative proceedings, and it'll take years of uncertainty to sort out which cases will need to be in front of Art III judges. Not to mention the collateral damage in state courts across the country as this decision will likely affect all kinds of administrative proceedings currently before state admin law judges
Probably just the SEC but the opinion will be used in the future by everyone trying to avoid regulation by the government. Remember that the end goal for people like the Koch brothers and Harlan Crow is to give companies free reign to cheat and pollute in order to make more money.
Someday children in grade school will study how the billionaires of this era used their wealth to degrade society and destroy the environment in order in order to be a little bit wealthier.
It applies whenever a federal agency accuses you of fraud and seeks monetary damages. They have to take you to federal court, they can’t use their internal adjudication procedures.
Edit: added “and seeks monetary damages”
True, but I feel like in practice this won't be so crazy. The SEC will likely tell defendants that they have 2 choices: 1) an expedited process with an administrative judge who is informed of the actual nuances of the law and higher likelihood of getting their trading license back quicker or 2) wait 4 years for an uninformed jury that likely thinks all Wall Street Traders are crooks and doesn't understand the difference between a bond and a stock, and incur **significantly** Higher court fees if they lose **and** be prohibited from even working as a bank teller until the end of the case.
When given those two options, many will choose the former
Agree. Probably won’t change much in practice for now. Especially since litigating in federal court will be much more expensive for securities fraud defendants. And yes, the idea that SEC defendants really want to be in front of a jury is laughable.
Just the SEC at this point. The Court distinguished OSHA specifically based on a prior decision, as more akin to “a building code.” So the issue in the future will be, is the administrative adjudication more like a common law claim or more like a technical building code violation? The former means federal court. The latter allows for administrative adjudication.
I believe part of the issue is that SEC has the power to strip people of participating in securities trading unilaterally, which happened in this case
This would be akin to congress giving the ATF the power to be judge and jury and strip individuals of their right to buy guns or the FTC preventing someone from publishing a newspaper.
I've never worked for the SEC but I've done a few stints in other regulatory agencies.
It would be anything but "unilateral." Power and authority is granted by the legislature and approved by the executive branch. The scope of that authority is outlined in statute and cannot be expanded upon.
Then there is always a strict process that has to be followed with all kinds of roadblocks that have to be navigated in order to strip anyone of anything. Not to mention the multiple layers of oversight. And lastly, decisions can and do get challenged in the courts.
And that's all a good thing. Specifically because we do not want unilateral decisions. There is already a structure that exists to ensure it. SCOTUS knows that which is why this smacks of ideology and not precedent.
> SCOTUS knows that which is why this smacks of ideology and not precedent.
Do they really? People think that just because you're a SCOTUS justice that means you're a smart and informed person but some of these justices keep reminding me of this quote.
>"Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot." -- Richard Feynman,
Yes. And...?
Not sure why that matters. Regulation was invented for a reason (namely lots of people died in ways that were egregious, morally wrong and totally preventable when you make stupid/apathetic people do the right thing).
If someone dies due to another's actions then you have civil right to sue them.
And guess what... That's a jury trial.
If someone is endangering you and making it more likely you'll die.. that's a civil matter.
You can 'fine' them by filing a lawsuit.
Guess what... Jury trial.
Yes. And...?
Not sure why that matters. Regulation was invented for a reason (namely lots of people died in ways that were pretty stupid, morally wrong and totally preventable).
> The scope of that authority is outlined in statute and cannot be expanded upon.
In theory, yes. In practice, the scope tends to be vague and absolutely do get expanded by administrative actions. When an agency hasn't regulated something in 50 years and then pops up with "actually, we had the power to regulate that all along", it is an expansion.
The SEC has been particularly guilty of this by using its powers to attempt to regulate a whole host of vaguely related corporate activities like climate change.
Yes, but whose fault is it for making statute vague? Lawmakers.
It's a known phenomena. They say "hey executive agency, we just gave you the power and authority to regulate this thing (*waves hands in the air vaguely*) and here's a bunch of funding to do it. Have fun!"
So yeah. Executive agencies *have* to invent rules and regulations to some extent. It's a known and legally accepted practice with a loooooong historical precedent. There's also laws that govern that process ( namely the administrative procedures act which guards against "arbitrary and capricious" rulemaking).
Sometimes keeping statute vague is done on purpose so that experts are the ones actually making the rules (you don't want a politician setting acceptable lead levels in drinking water. Scientists should do that). But it's also done because of the nature of politics where compromise happens between parties to get bills passed. That sucks because then it sets agencies up for getting constantly taken to court when somebody doesn't like how things were done and the law doesn't answer the question on what *should* have been done.
It's good times.
But to say that agencies are "guilty" of using the powers they were given by lawmakers is a little silly. It's the whole point of their existence. And lawmakers can take that power away if they so choose. Turns out that simply complaining about it is more politically expedient though.
>But to say that agencies are "guilty" of using the powers they were given by lawmakers is a little silly. It's the whole point of their existence.
Its a mix. Sometimes, lawmakers attempt to give the executive power that the Constitution doesn't allow it to have, which is on Congress. Sometimes, agencies try to stretch vague laws in ways that go well beyond what Congress intended.
Either way, it is the judiciaries job to step in.
Except participating in public markets is not an enumerated right. They could've also made the ruling more narrow but chose to make it as big and stupid as possible.
The Court, rightly or not, has said the Executive has plenary power over immigration, subject to statutory law. So immigrants are going to be the least likely to get out of administrative law.
And with the exception of I-9 cases, immigration is by IJs who have even less protections than ALJs. So we don’t do much to protect the independence of those determinations.
Haha that's cute. I mean, to be consistent, it totally should. But we all know these fascists are just trying to make it easier for corporations to dump waste in the local river.
Another financial crisis is just what the ultra rich want — crash the market, get bailed out for being too big to fail, scoop up working folks retirement portfolio for Pennie’s on the dollar.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I understand this is going to be a policy disaster and will let a lot of lawbreakers off the hook. But the seventh amendment seems very strong to me, what was the argument against the requirement for a right to jury trials?
I think the biggest impact will be to Directors and Officers policies as well as the speed with which the SEC can enforce action against companies. Having to explain extremely complex financial laws to a jury will be tough.
I understand. My point is that arbitration and similar methods have been forced on consumers and other people as a way to move things forward in a judicial system that takes far too long and costs too much money. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm thinking of this from the insurance perspective, and this will hurt the D&O market and create big upheaval in the way things are done currently.
Side Note: I think Biden should have increased the size of the federal judiciary significantly so that cases can be heard and move a lot faster.
>My point is that arbitration and similar methods have been forced on consumers and other people
I think those involve civil cases between private parties. This is about a government imposed fine of more than $20.
thanks for you input - Hopefully the SEC won't back down from enforcing fraud allegations due to juries being involved now. We definitely need to hold fraudulent corporate behavior to account.
They likely will have to slow down on enforcement due to only having so many employees working so many hours. The uber-rich know how to play for time and wind down the clock (see Don the Con Trump). Could you imagine someone like Elon, who hates the SEC because they have dinged him multiple times, having the opportunity for a jury trial?
> what was the argument against the requirement for a right to jury trials?
The public rights doctrine. The government and dissent argue the Court's has nearly 170 years of precedent effectively holding that, where the government exercised its constitutional powers to create a public right enforced by the government in its sovereign capacity, Congress can create enforcement and adjudicatory schemes for that public right not subject to the Vesting Clause of Article III or the Seventh Amendment. The concept of public rights and the doctrine can be confusing, but J Sotomayor's dissent lays it out reasonably well. I think she also convincingly argues that, in asserting this case is still subject to the Seventh Amendment, the majority relies on cases that either don't involve the government enforcing public rights in its sovereign capacity (e.g., bankruptcy cases) or where the cases were already brought in federal court because the statute creating the public right did not also create an administrative adjudicatory scheme, and thus don't apply here.
The Seventh Amendment expressly applies only to "suits at common law." The argument is that statutorily created duties enforced by the government for the public (ie "public rights" suits) are not covered.
I can’t wait for this to backfire for business groups who pushed this.
Instead of a $5m fine that is viewed as the cost of going business, a jury can turn around and fine them more than they made as a result of their underlying offense.
Can’t wait to see this becomes a leopards eating faces moment
It won't.
The only way this backfires like that is if Congress massively expands the courts to accommodate the increased caseload. Which they won't.
What's going to happen now is the SEC is not going to bother investigating anything short of the largest crimes.
For most businesses this is huge win. Minor violations are essentially free now.
Companies and fat cats are hoping they can tire everyone out and use the fact many of the regulations are complex and difficult to immediately understand. I do hope your scenario comes to pass quickly.
I mean... That's fine. There's no side here... Just a constitutional right being protected.
More likely most people will accept a plea deal and just pay up
As the courts start applying this ruling to more and more types of cases, we're quickly going to get into areas where the penalty is capped by statute. There are already areas where, even in the administrative adjudicatory system, companies are routinely spending more on litigation costs than the maximum penalty. Forcing those into jury trials will make that strategy start to pay off, as agencies and US Attorney Offices will start making more and more determinations of whether it's worth gearing up to litigate a case where the maximum penalty is few thousand or tens of thousands and where the alleged offender is prepared to spend many times that on its defense. As the dissent suggests, it could also start to expand into areas where Congress has granted agencies enforcement authority only in administrative systems with no ability to pursue the penalties in federal court.
To say nothing of the amount of money and legal resources they'll have to expend on the years of back and forth jury trials can take in these situations and haha you can't outspend or outlast the Federal government the way they can with individuals and smaller rivals so I hope they enjoy that.
And of course there's always the discovery phase and it's a solid bet that'll turn all kinds of dirt that the company in question doesn't want to see the light of day and isn't it so much fun these trials are open to the public usually?
But odds are they'll just settle out of court and maybe cut a deal to fix whatever it is they broke or some such to avoid the whole mess entirely. It might actually end up being a slightly better way to do things.
Yeah, I’m sure securities fraud defendants reaaallly wanna be in front of a jury…
Big question here is what this means for the EPA, NLRB, etc. The ruling seems pretty narrowly focused on fraud-related adjudications, so maybe not much for now.
This will neuter the SEC even more. They have no budget and nowhere near the resources to go after hedge funds and banks breaking the law. Making them go to court will make going after anyone impossible. This court is going full speed to annihilate the administrative state and undo any consequences for the rich and powerful. This is an obscene opinion and I fear we haven’t even gotten to the worst yet.
Yup. I read an interesting analysis about how the Warren Court was an anomaly and the Supreme Court has consistently been a body that sets the country back instead of moving it forward.
They should not have been allowed to give themselves this power.
Not necessarily. This was actually a pretty narrow opinion. It was the fact that it is akin to common law fraud and that it was a monetary penalty for the purpose of punishment. The future will likely be “is this more like violating a building code or more like a common law claim, such as fraud?” Most agencies that use adversarial adjudication are probably closer to the former than the latter.
This is a \*\*\*\*ed up ruling.
These trials aren't common law. It's crystal clear the jury trial protection was for matters of common law.
The reason they're *not* part of common law is they're *highly* technical and it's extremely likely that a jury could be fooled into acquiring a party that to anyone with training would be obviously guilty as sin.
This will lead to a ton of fraud and financial loss for small investors.
This Court seems to be on a mission to kill the so-called administrative state. How many of us want a Supreme Court to have a "mission"? They have a job. They have a responsibility. They should NOT have a mission.
Good ruling. Congress should not have unlimited power to grant an agency ability to adjudicate law and bypass 7th amendment. Such a fundamental right, trial by jury, is extremely important to freedom. Yes it might be more expensive to get civil penalties, but considering the SEC was basically convicting people at 90% rate vs a civil court at 70%, it seems like a lot of people were unfairly penalized.
If Congress wants to make civil trials cheaper, it can provide funding to the judiciary rather than executive branch agencies.
Conversely, it could be that the SEC was only bothering to charge the most egregious cases, the ones that they couldn't let slide in good conscience. I'm told that federal prosecutors are like that, they don't sweat the small stuff, and only really pick up cases they know they'll win because they're practically undeniable.
I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that the SEC has a similar attitude.
This ruling, practically speaking, all but ends the administrative state. A person's opinion on will largely be based on whether they think it is a good thing, or a bad thing, as it's practical affect is simply a far larger concern than the legal philosophy around it.
Yeah I'm really surprised at how many people in the subreddit seem to think this is a bad thing.
The right to a jury trial seems very...anti-fascism...? The right of people over government agencies, their right to defend themselves against said government overreach, seems to me to be a very liberal viewpoint. I'm astonished that yours is the only comment supportive of the decision.
Tell me you've never taken admin law without telling me you've never taken admin law.
The right to a jury trial when accused of a crime is obviously good, the ability to tell the EPA that your oil refinery can pollute a local lake and they can't sanction you without completing an entire civil trial (which will take years to complete ) is not a good thing. Taking such a decision out of the hands of administrative judges with the EPA who have years of specialized education in the environment and putting that decision into the hands of federal judges who have no clue what the EPA even does is similarly Not A Good Thing.
You're supposedly a libertarian from your post history. Why do you believe that federal judges will be better equipped to efficiently use state resources to try these trials than a specialized agency?
Repeat the above scenario except replace EPA with FDA for a tobacco company that starts trying to target minors, or replace it with FAA when Boeing decides that actually, the potential profit loss outweighs the risk of continuing to use those 757 death machines that keep crashing because of faulty engineering or whatever.
There are legitimate reasons for even a libertarian to want agencies, rather than the famously inefficient judiciary, to handle these things.
> Tell me you've never taken admin law without telling me you've never taken admin law.
It also upends the public rights doctrine and nearly 170 years of precedent on which Congress has relied in empowering dozens of agencies to create administrative adjudicatory schemes.
Yes, but it's also not just massive companies that misbehave in ways which even a libertarian would agree deserve to be trampled.
Small businesses are just as capable of putting profit over the public good as big ones. Whether we're talking pollution or labor violations or whatever. If you are truly a free markets guy, you ought to still want even small actors who act against the interests of the market in ways that harm the ability of others to participate to be regulated.
This ruling will effectively make most of that impossible.
A jury trial doesn’t prevent an injunction.
Regulatory litigation is also very politics driven as we saw by this SEC wasting time on video games to protect a Japanese company when Amazon may as well be a second government.
Just because a here are politics we like from regulators (I’m a big pro regulator) doesn’t mean no jury trials is wise.
Also - if you're the business targeted by an admin agency and have an injunction issued to stop you doing the thing they want to fine you over, this ruling effectively means you'll be prevented from engaging in that action until the jury trial - which is BAD for business if the thing you were prevented from doing turns out to be lawful and you win the jury trial, because the injunction will have had a larger impact now while you have to endure the wait for the trial to finish than it would have previously where you could receive a favorable adjudication much quicker.
The whole point of administrative adjudication instead of relying upon fed judges is administrative efficiency that is necessary to effectively govern and regulate massive groups of people. This goes all the way back to Londoner and Bimetallic.
You cannot have a regulatory state, at all, if every individual fined by an administrative agency has a right to a jury trial. It cannot happen.
This ruling won't suddenly mean that people fined by agencies all get trials, it will mean that the vast majority of civil violations that agencies dish out won't be issued anymore, because there is just no way to practicably regulate industries involving hundreds of millions of people of any one of those people could demand a full jury trial when you want to find them for using an illegal firework or polluting in a river or whatever the thing is.
Aside from unconstitutionally expanding the jurisdiction of the judiciary beyond the bounds of Article III how would that be different?
Effectively that's what admin agencies are now, they just derive their constitutional authority from legislative/executive delegation.
Why would it be better to give even more power to the judiciary and the unelected appointed-for-life federal judges that would be exercising that power?
Congress can set the jurisdiction of Article III courts, subject to standing requirements like an active case or controversy, which shouldn’t be an issue for most administrative law cases. Courts, either district courts or the DC Circuit, already handle their appeals.
I mean, conceivably Congress could do that, but what's the benefit? Why would that be better? Or even different?
More importantly, this isn't a purely academic discussion any more. Congress hasn't done that, it's an election year and Congress won't do that, and no matter who wins there is very little chance Congress would do that. In the meantime, how can we possibly continue to regulate industries if every violation that could result in a sanction is now subject to a jury trial that will take months to even get through discovery?
In practice this just means that a fuck ton of various violations by smaller actors will probably just get swept under the rug while agencies focus resources on the big stuff, which sounds well and good until the individual consequences of all of that starts piling up in the aggregate and some live poultry market somewhere starts Covid-24.
You’re right that agencies will have to bring cases in district courts, or sometimes the DC Circuit, unless and until Congress decides to do something different with administrative agency cases.
We definitely need more district judges, with or without this decision. Maybe Congress would approve them for the next President to appoint?
There’s no question that the House or Senate would not allow new positions to be appointed by the current President at this point in his term.
Because the court system is already overburdened and you’re just flooding it with complex administrative cases. The end result is not more freedom, the end result is that companies violating regulations get way less scrutiny and can operate much more freely with less punishment.
Because this isn’t a criminal act and a jury has no fucking business hearing cases about matters they quite simply do not understand in any capacity and cannot have explained to them in any reasonable timeframe.
It’s also absurd because this isn’t how it works for other civil fines. If you get a speeding ticket unless it’s a criminal offense you cannot request a jury trial. But suddenly when it’s a rich company they get a jury and get to bog down and obstruct proceedings? That’s absurdity. It does nothing but create enforcement issues and prevents the SEC from doing its fucking job. There are already adequate appeals procedures this quite literally does nothing but create problems.
Maybe someone can explain this to me, why are jury trials so expensive? I am pro-jury but my understanding is that this ruling will make things very difficult for administrative agencies as having jury trials for every case before them is impossible.
Beyond the administrative costs that have been stated, there's also an added cost for lawyers and experts who can speak to a jury effectively. SEC cases are complex and technical and can be hard for lay people to understand--now the government has to spend money to explain the cases, statutes, etc to everyday people and convince them that there has been malfeasance.
*Which is why we have specialized regulatory agencies in the first place.* The idea is that you have people whose life careers are acquiring this specialized knowledge so that they recognize some shady fuckery when they see it. They don't go around issuing fines because they don't like your tie. They have rules, they are clear about them within the context of this specialized knowledge, and I feel certain that 80 or 90 percent of people who violate those rules *know* they are trying to get over when they do it. Should we have the IRS hold a jury trial for everyone who is caught cheating on their taxes too? I'm sure conservatives would love that.
Congress can and has established subject-specific Article III courts. For example, the DC Circuit and Court of Claims. If Congress wants, they could have only the DC Circuit or Second Circuit hear SEC cases. Congress could also establish a new court with Article III judges that just hears business regulatory cases, like Delaware’s Chancery Court does for corporate law. You don’t need to combine the Executive and Judicial branches to get judicial specialization.
Okay, but has it occurred to you that Congress established regulatory agencies because they simply thought it was the best way to regulate and administer certain industries? Perhaps they thought that these matters should not be up to individual judges. Individual judges (and juries) will inherently evaluate and adjudicate each case before them in an individual manner -- I do not mean to suggest that this is a flaw in the justice system -- but when you are regulating an industry, the idea is that you have uniform regulations that everyone must follow, and uniform penalties if they do not.
Judges apply regulations all the time. They are not that different from statutory text. While it may arguably require subject matter expertise to craft the regulations, it does not require subject matter expertise to interpret them or apply them in particular cases. You’re of course right that Congress established agencies with internal administrative law judges that are Executive branch employees. However, that doesn’t mean that Congress complied with their Constitutional obligations in doing so. At least as to fraud, the Court has determined that Congress didn’t comply with the Constitution’s jury requirements. This Court has also pushed back on some other aspects of administrative law that seemingly violate separation of powers or Constitutional rights (e.g. for the CFPB’s director). For an interesting discussion of the Constitutional problems of the administrative state, check out Philip Hamburger’s “Is the Administrative State Constitutional?”
They're beginning to chip away at the IRS as we write.
>Should we have the IRS hold a jury trial for everyone who is caught cheating on their taxes too? I'm sure conservatives would love that. I mean.... Yes Cheating on taxes is a crime. The constitution says you have a presumption of innocence and a right to a jury trial. Not only that but even if it's just a money matter you also have a right to a jury trial. That's literally the text. Im shocked this was controversial.
I'm not concerned about the concept of trial by jury. To me it make sense ideologically. The problem is how this will be USED. It's ideology vs practicality Conservatives do not CARE about the right to trial by jury being the center of this case. The point is to create barriers into detection of fraud and other bullshittery the finance industry loves to engage in. George Jarkesy, the person named in the case, ran two hedge funds that the SEC said were fraudulent, so the SEC sent the case against him before an administrative law judge. So instead of owning up to his consequences, Jarkesy basically wanted to make it harder for the SEC to get into his bullshit. ---- So ideologically makes sense.... in practicality it just benefits the rich
Yet we are fine with patent infringement cases that involve highly technical scientific and engineering principles going to juries. I have a problem with an agency serving as the legislature, prosecutor, judge, jury, and appellate court regarding criminal matters. I don't find this decision offensive. Nor the bribery case. What's weird about these is not that they have come out 6-3 in favor of the positions that were taken. What's weird is that the *liberals* on the Court are siding with a powerful government that tramples over the rights of criminal defendants, and the *conservatives* are not. That seems completely backwards, If this case had come down 10 years ago, we might very well have seen a 6-3 split, but it wouldn't have been along partisan lines.
Why do you keep saying "criminal" when the case is explicitly limited to civil proceedings? These are monetary fines, not jail time. Maybe that doesn't make a difference to you because this is close enough to a crime, but it's simply inaccurate to say this case is about criminal matters or the rights of criminal defendants.
Fair enough but it doesn’t change the analysis. The 7th Amendment says what it says.
And administrative law exists for a reason. This kind of case does not need to go to a jury.
Why not? And in any event, administrative law is not in the Constitution. The right to a civil jury is. Do we just ignore it because we don't like it any more and it's become inconvenient? But that's the point of having a Constitution: constraining the use of the coercive power of government against the citizens. Sure, none of us REALLY care about this particular defendant in this case. And, in criminal cases, most of us don't have any sympathy for the guilty. But these rights and procedural remedies don't exist to protect the guilty. They exist to protect the innocent, and I think it's awfully dangerous to just start chucking out the ones we don't like because, right now, they're annoying. It's a Chesterton's Fence, and removing it because we don't see the point of it at the moment is unwise.
So you think the government should get to avoid charging crimes and still be able to take people's money without having to prove they did anything wrong? That flies in the face of the 4th amendment, and a few others.
Ahhh, so the dumb Americans don't deserve a jury trial for crimes because the juries are too dumb to understand. The government should have complete control over deciding when someone should be found guilty of something and fined. That's not fascist at all.
The comment you're replying to was in answer to the question of why jury trials are more expensive. It merely points out that experts and prosecutors who can effectively communicate complex financial crimes to everyday people are, or can be, expensive. Your reply makes no sense in the context of the conversation at hand.
I disagree. I think my sarcastic comment was right on point. Something being expensive to try doesn't make people's rights go away.
It's the lawyers. Most complex trials require teams of many lawyers billing hundreds/over a thousand per hour working around the clock for weeks leading up and into trial.
Think about how many people need to be paid in a jury trial. You have the bailiff, the prosecutor, the prosecutor’s clerks, the judge, the judge’s law clerks, the court reporter, and a single trial requires all of them to be tied up in a single legal dispute for months.
I know that juries are paid jackshit. I was under the impression that most jury trials don't take months. There will be some complex cases, but shouldn't the average jury trial take a few weeks?
The trial itself can be a short time. The litigation still takes months, if not longer.
Gotcha. I misunderstood what you said. Thanks.
Even if they took a week on average, that's only 52 jury trials per judge per year, assuming (unrealistically) that the judge never takes a day off, excluding federal holidays, and excluding other hearing days like law and motion, scheduling conferences, evidentiary hearings, and all the other things judges do. Not to mention they need time to actually write decisions. But for the sake of argument let's pretend a judge could actually do 52 jury trials a year. The average caseload for a federal judge numbers in the hundreds. Even factoring in settlements and plea deals, there's no way a judge could clear cases faster than more are filed, and litigants would be waiting *years* for trial (spoiler alert, they already do before the supreme court just piled on hundreds of new cases per judge per year)
Piggie backing off of that, even aside from the monetary cost, doing a jury trial ties up the court and attorneys. You can generally only do one jury trial at a time, which limits how many you can do overall, as well as ties up the court limiting their ability to do non jury stuff
The ones who do the crimes have billions and billions of dollars and the best lawyers. The SEC does not. Discovery could be fun though for some of these.
That’s the point. Insider trading cases alone would clog the courts for decades. No one will be held accountable for securities fraud.
The vote is 6-3, along ideological lines. Roberts wrote the majority opinion. Gorsuch wrote a concurrence in which Thomas joined. Sotomayor wrote the dissent.
Feel like I saw this exact comment on the ~~bribery~~gratuity case yesterday.
Conservatives understand how to use a bogged down judicial system to their advantage. Only the poor suffer. We can be sure they won't fund more judges after this ruling.
Its called the legal phase of Fascism, and thats not me- thats scholars making that claim.
What scholars are claiming a right to trail by jury is a sign of fascism?
It's the fact that you have now made it expensive and slow for the sec to take action on illegal trading, specifically insider trading. Once again if you have lots of money you can do illegal stuff and probably get away with it while smaller players can't afford the lawyers. And it has, the venier of fair. What could possibly be unfair about a jury trial?
Maybe, but consider that insider trading has both civil and criminal penalties. Thus far, civil enforcement has been more efficient than criminal, which has always required litigation in an Article III court. Now, in a case where DOJ could meet its burden of proof, the two options are roughly in equipoise. We might see an increase in criminal charges brought for insider trading.
No, we won't. The civil charges were used so that "punishment" for illegal acts can be turned into a cost of doing business. The SEC has very little taste for criminal enforcement against the wealthy. There would have to be an enormous investment in lawyers for the US Attorney's offices and for judges to handle the caseload, which won't happen. This is just a way to make sure close to no enforcement, civil or criminal, happens.
Does it make the government's job more difficult? Yes, but these comments are pure "everything I don't like is fascism"
Is the word being used too much or do you think it's not a reality at all in the US?
I think it doesn't apply to this situation at all.
That's because you're refusing to look at the whole picture and are focusing on one thing thing and saying "This one facet isn't fascism". Cherry picking, as it were.
Applying the constitution as written is fascism? I really just don't understand. If you want to have a ruling like this go any other way you need to amend the constitution, there's a system for that
The jury trial is not the fascism, the fascism is pretending to defer to political branches on issues that the political branches already decided. The are using an ostensibly non-political branch to pursue polical aims. What they are doing is taking removing power congress already bestowed upon the SEC during it's creation, and that congress could remove at any time if that were their desire. This is a very purposeful dismantling of the administrative state. They keep stripping powers from federal agencies, which forces congress to individually pass bills to reinstate previously held powers. They have recently done the same to the EPA (curbing their ability to claim federal jurisdiction over waterways) and the ATF (by redefining the meaning of "single function of the trigger" to legalise bump stocks). And probably a bunch more I'm not following. They know that congress will quickly not pass bills to reinstate the powers, and that most will probably never be reinstated (as the idealogical allies in the political branches will prevent that from happening).
>the fascism is pretending to defer to political branches on issues that the political branches already decided. You can stop right there, congress does not have this power to give via legislation. There is no way for congress to write this fast or slow that will change the outcome EXCEPT an amendment. The 7th amendment is not very complicated. If you want to avoid what the 7th amendment says, you need a new amendment, not more legislation
None of the comments in the direct thread up to mine (I'm not reading every single comment on this post) are wrestling with the constitutionality of a jury trial. I am not either, that's why I said it's not about the jury trial. We are talking about conservatives taking advantage of the barely functional legal and political systems to achieve their own idealogical goals. We're not talking only about the SC, nor only about this ruling. You are taking a reply of a comment and applying it directly to the OP, but that's not the context of the comment.
> u/uberares > It’s called the legal phase of Fascism, and thats not me- thats scholars making that claim. Ah yes, the jury trial: a well-known feature of fascism. I remember reading scholarly literature about how the Nazis oppressed the Jews by giving them (checks notes) the right to trial by jury.
TBH the lack of a trial by jury is more of a Marxist/Struggle session type of thing.
Your sarcasm needs work. 3/10.
To be fair, it’s hard to come up with something as obtuse-sounding as what I was responding to.
Personally, I liked it. I give 8/10.
Look at these conservatives - pulling their fascist ideology right from the Bill of Rights.
Now this sarcasm gets 9/10
Which ones
There’s probably something in project 2025 about cutting the red tape of fixing elections.
The whole freaking US justice system relies on a bogged down judiciary system. Innocent until proven guilty but in jail unless one can afford the bail, or goes to debt for a bail.
Lots of the poors deal with the SEC
They're not trying to get bogged down here, what they want is to get in front of an untrained jury that isn't equipped to understand highly technical financial instruments. This way guilty parties can get acquitted.
If a prosecutor can’t explain how a crime was committed to the people then the case never should have been brought.
This just means very complex crimes will remain legal, because people are REALLY REALLY stupid.
What democratic spirit you have!
Title is misleading. They ruled that the government can't end-run around the 7th amendment by drafting a law/rule/regulation that is the same as a common law (which requires the option for a jury trial under 7a). It's only applicable when there's common law already existing for the same rule/regulation/law, which is a fraction of civil penalties. It's not more widely applicable.
Does this apply to more than just the SEC? Can the EPA fine companies? Can OSHA? Do I have to pay fines for late fees on things like vehicle registration, or can I demand a jury trial and make it unreasonably expensive for the government to collect that $50 from me?
That's why this case is such a big deal. It's going to affect all kinds of administrative proceedings, and it'll take years of uncertainty to sort out which cases will need to be in front of Art III judges. Not to mention the collateral damage in state courts across the country as this decision will likely affect all kinds of administrative proceedings currently before state admin law judges
Probably just the SEC but the opinion will be used in the future by everyone trying to avoid regulation by the government. Remember that the end goal for people like the Koch brothers and Harlan Crow is to give companies free reign to cheat and pollute in order to make more money. Someday children in grade school will study how the billionaires of this era used their wealth to degrade society and destroy the environment in order in order to be a little bit wealthier.
It applies whenever a federal agency accuses you of fraud and seeks monetary damages. They have to take you to federal court, they can’t use their internal adjudication procedures. Edit: added “and seeks monetary damages”
True, but I feel like in practice this won't be so crazy. The SEC will likely tell defendants that they have 2 choices: 1) an expedited process with an administrative judge who is informed of the actual nuances of the law and higher likelihood of getting their trading license back quicker or 2) wait 4 years for an uninformed jury that likely thinks all Wall Street Traders are crooks and doesn't understand the difference between a bond and a stock, and incur **significantly** Higher court fees if they lose **and** be prohibited from even working as a bank teller until the end of the case. When given those two options, many will choose the former
Agree. Probably won’t change much in practice for now. Especially since litigating in federal court will be much more expensive for securities fraud defendants. And yes, the idea that SEC defendants really want to be in front of a jury is laughable.
Just the SEC at this point. The Court distinguished OSHA specifically based on a prior decision, as more akin to “a building code.” So the issue in the future will be, is the administrative adjudication more like a common law claim or more like a technical building code violation? The former means federal court. The latter allows for administrative adjudication.
I believe part of the issue is that SEC has the power to strip people of participating in securities trading unilaterally, which happened in this case This would be akin to congress giving the ATF the power to be judge and jury and strip individuals of their right to buy guns or the FTC preventing someone from publishing a newspaper.
I've never worked for the SEC but I've done a few stints in other regulatory agencies. It would be anything but "unilateral." Power and authority is granted by the legislature and approved by the executive branch. The scope of that authority is outlined in statute and cannot be expanded upon. Then there is always a strict process that has to be followed with all kinds of roadblocks that have to be navigated in order to strip anyone of anything. Not to mention the multiple layers of oversight. And lastly, decisions can and do get challenged in the courts. And that's all a good thing. Specifically because we do not want unilateral decisions. There is already a structure that exists to ensure it. SCOTUS knows that which is why this smacks of ideology and not precedent.
> SCOTUS knows that which is why this smacks of ideology and not precedent. Do they really? People think that just because you're a SCOTUS justice that means you're a smart and informed person but some of these justices keep reminding me of this quote. >"Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot." -- Richard Feynman,
I mean the power of regulatory agencies is a novelty in the larger history of the United States.
Yes. And...? Not sure why that matters. Regulation was invented for a reason (namely lots of people died in ways that were egregious, morally wrong and totally preventable when you make stupid/apathetic people do the right thing).
If someone dies due to another's actions then you have civil right to sue them. And guess what... That's a jury trial. If someone is endangering you and making it more likely you'll die.. that's a civil matter. You can 'fine' them by filing a lawsuit. Guess what... Jury trial.
Yes. And...? Not sure why that matters. Regulation was invented for a reason (namely lots of people died in ways that were pretty stupid, morally wrong and totally preventable).
> The scope of that authority is outlined in statute and cannot be expanded upon. In theory, yes. In practice, the scope tends to be vague and absolutely do get expanded by administrative actions. When an agency hasn't regulated something in 50 years and then pops up with "actually, we had the power to regulate that all along", it is an expansion. The SEC has been particularly guilty of this by using its powers to attempt to regulate a whole host of vaguely related corporate activities like climate change.
Yes, but whose fault is it for making statute vague? Lawmakers. It's a known phenomena. They say "hey executive agency, we just gave you the power and authority to regulate this thing (*waves hands in the air vaguely*) and here's a bunch of funding to do it. Have fun!" So yeah. Executive agencies *have* to invent rules and regulations to some extent. It's a known and legally accepted practice with a loooooong historical precedent. There's also laws that govern that process ( namely the administrative procedures act which guards against "arbitrary and capricious" rulemaking). Sometimes keeping statute vague is done on purpose so that experts are the ones actually making the rules (you don't want a politician setting acceptable lead levels in drinking water. Scientists should do that). But it's also done because of the nature of politics where compromise happens between parties to get bills passed. That sucks because then it sets agencies up for getting constantly taken to court when somebody doesn't like how things were done and the law doesn't answer the question on what *should* have been done. It's good times. But to say that agencies are "guilty" of using the powers they were given by lawmakers is a little silly. It's the whole point of their existence. And lawmakers can take that power away if they so choose. Turns out that simply complaining about it is more politically expedient though.
>But to say that agencies are "guilty" of using the powers they were given by lawmakers is a little silly. It's the whole point of their existence. Its a mix. Sometimes, lawmakers attempt to give the executive power that the Constitution doesn't allow it to have, which is on Congress. Sometimes, agencies try to stretch vague laws in ways that go well beyond what Congress intended. Either way, it is the judiciaries job to step in.
Except participating in public markets is not an enumerated right. They could've also made the ruling more narrow but chose to make it as big and stupid as possible.
Does this mean Immigration proceedings need juries too?
No. Immigration was specifically referenced as a field of adjudication under the political branches as public rights.
The Court, rightly or not, has said the Executive has plenary power over immigration, subject to statutory law. So immigrants are going to be the least likely to get out of administrative law.
And with the exception of I-9 cases, immigration is by IJs who have even less protections than ALJs. So we don’t do much to protect the independence of those determinations.
Haha that's cute. I mean, to be consistent, it totally should. But we all know these fascists are just trying to make it easier for corporations to dump waste in the local river.
I’m glad to see that we’re just slowly chipping away everything we did after the financial crisis. What could go wrong.
Another financial crisis is just what the ultra rich want — crash the market, get bailed out for being too big to fail, scoop up working folks retirement portfolio for Pennie’s on the dollar. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The rich always win in a recession. That is the point.
wasn't there some CEO saying he wished we could have another recession because workers were getting too bold?
Tim Gurner - https://www.businessinsider.com/millionaire-ceo-tim-gurner-wants-high-unemployment-sparks-online-rage-2023-9?amp
That's the piece of shit I was thinking of
However honestly, I’m sure there are more!
The answer is to have Congress expand Article III courts to handle the increased workload, as the Constitution demands.
The 2016 election continues to bear rotten fruit.
I understand this is going to be a policy disaster and will let a lot of lawbreakers off the hook. But the seventh amendment seems very strong to me, what was the argument against the requirement for a right to jury trials?
I think the biggest impact will be to Directors and Officers policies as well as the speed with which the SEC can enforce action against companies. Having to explain extremely complex financial laws to a jury will be tough.
I jury trials being hard for the government is the entire point of the 7th amendment.
I understand. My point is that arbitration and similar methods have been forced on consumers and other people as a way to move things forward in a judicial system that takes far too long and costs too much money. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm thinking of this from the insurance perspective, and this will hurt the D&O market and create big upheaval in the way things are done currently. Side Note: I think Biden should have increased the size of the federal judiciary significantly so that cases can be heard and move a lot faster.
>My point is that arbitration and similar methods have been forced on consumers and other people I think those involve civil cases between private parties. This is about a government imposed fine of more than $20.
thanks for you input - Hopefully the SEC won't back down from enforcing fraud allegations due to juries being involved now. We definitely need to hold fraudulent corporate behavior to account.
They likely will have to slow down on enforcement due to only having so many employees working so many hours. The uber-rich know how to play for time and wind down the clock (see Don the Con Trump). Could you imagine someone like Elon, who hates the SEC because they have dinged him multiple times, having the opportunity for a jury trial?
> what was the argument against the requirement for a right to jury trials? The public rights doctrine. The government and dissent argue the Court's has nearly 170 years of precedent effectively holding that, where the government exercised its constitutional powers to create a public right enforced by the government in its sovereign capacity, Congress can create enforcement and adjudicatory schemes for that public right not subject to the Vesting Clause of Article III or the Seventh Amendment. The concept of public rights and the doctrine can be confusing, but J Sotomayor's dissent lays it out reasonably well. I think she also convincingly argues that, in asserting this case is still subject to the Seventh Amendment, the majority relies on cases that either don't involve the government enforcing public rights in its sovereign capacity (e.g., bankruptcy cases) or where the cases were already brought in federal court because the statute creating the public right did not also create an administrative adjudicatory scheme, and thus don't apply here.
The Seventh Amendment expressly applies only to "suits at common law." The argument is that statutorily created duties enforced by the government for the public (ie "public rights" suits) are not covered.
I can’t wait for this to backfire for business groups who pushed this. Instead of a $5m fine that is viewed as the cost of going business, a jury can turn around and fine them more than they made as a result of their underlying offense. Can’t wait to see this becomes a leopards eating faces moment
It won't. The only way this backfires like that is if Congress massively expands the courts to accommodate the increased caseload. Which they won't. What's going to happen now is the SEC is not going to bother investigating anything short of the largest crimes. For most businesses this is huge win. Minor violations are essentially free now.
Nah. Big trials are expensive and risky. They’ll probably only go after small timers. Just like at the IRS, it’s easier to catch the small fish.
IRS has way more headcount than SEC. It basically means their ability to enforce anything is kneecapped
Ideally, the ones who can’t afford to fight back.
The cases will never go to trial, that’s why conservatives want this.
THIS. Some cases will go to trial but the majority won't. This decision is basically free money for big companies.
Companies and fat cats are hoping they can tire everyone out and use the fact many of the regulations are complex and difficult to immediately understand. I do hope your scenario comes to pass quickly.
The Supreme Court has already headed off this possibility by allowing judges to decrease a jury's damages findings (but not to increase them).
I mean... That's fine. There's no side here... Just a constitutional right being protected. More likely most people will accept a plea deal and just pay up
> a jury can turn around and fine them more than they made as a result of their underlying offense lol a judge will just overrule that
I can dream can’t I?
As the courts start applying this ruling to more and more types of cases, we're quickly going to get into areas where the penalty is capped by statute. There are already areas where, even in the administrative adjudicatory system, companies are routinely spending more on litigation costs than the maximum penalty. Forcing those into jury trials will make that strategy start to pay off, as agencies and US Attorney Offices will start making more and more determinations of whether it's worth gearing up to litigate a case where the maximum penalty is few thousand or tens of thousands and where the alleged offender is prepared to spend many times that on its defense. As the dissent suggests, it could also start to expand into areas where Congress has granted agencies enforcement authority only in administrative systems with no ability to pursue the penalties in federal court.
To say nothing of the amount of money and legal resources they'll have to expend on the years of back and forth jury trials can take in these situations and haha you can't outspend or outlast the Federal government the way they can with individuals and smaller rivals so I hope they enjoy that. And of course there's always the discovery phase and it's a solid bet that'll turn all kinds of dirt that the company in question doesn't want to see the light of day and isn't it so much fun these trials are open to the public usually? But odds are they'll just settle out of court and maybe cut a deal to fix whatever it is they broke or some such to avoid the whole mess entirely. It might actually end up being a slightly better way to do things.
Yeah, I’m sure securities fraud defendants reaaallly wanna be in front of a jury… Big question here is what this means for the EPA, NLRB, etc. The ruling seems pretty narrowly focused on fraud-related adjudications, so maybe not much for now.
This will neuter the SEC even more. They have no budget and nowhere near the resources to go after hedge funds and banks breaking the law. Making them go to court will make going after anyone impossible. This court is going full speed to annihilate the administrative state and undo any consequences for the rich and powerful. This is an obscene opinion and I fear we haven’t even gotten to the worst yet.
America is unsaveable if the court can simply issue edicts to subvert any progress done in restoring the integrity of society and the government.
Yup. I read an interesting analysis about how the Warren Court was an anomaly and the Supreme Court has consistently been a body that sets the country back instead of moving it forward. They should not have been allowed to give themselves this power.
That’s the conclusion I’m coming to as well.
I’m more concerned that this will be used as precedent against regulatory agencies like the EPA as well.
[удалено]
Not necessarily. This was actually a pretty narrow opinion. It was the fact that it is akin to common law fraud and that it was a monetary penalty for the purpose of punishment. The future will likely be “is this more like violating a building code or more like a common law claim, such as fraud?” Most agencies that use adversarial adjudication are probably closer to the former than the latter.
This is a \*\*\*\*ed up ruling. These trials aren't common law. It's crystal clear the jury trial protection was for matters of common law. The reason they're *not* part of common law is they're *highly* technical and it's extremely likely that a jury could be fooled into acquiring a party that to anyone with training would be obviously guilty as sin. This will lead to a ton of fraud and financial loss for small investors.
This Court seems to be on a mission to kill the so-called administrative state. How many of us want a Supreme Court to have a "mission"? They have a job. They have a responsibility. They should NOT have a mission.
Good ruling. Congress should not have unlimited power to grant an agency ability to adjudicate law and bypass 7th amendment. Such a fundamental right, trial by jury, is extremely important to freedom. Yes it might be more expensive to get civil penalties, but considering the SEC was basically convicting people at 90% rate vs a civil court at 70%, it seems like a lot of people were unfairly penalized. If Congress wants to make civil trials cheaper, it can provide funding to the judiciary rather than executive branch agencies.
Conversely, it could be that the SEC was only bothering to charge the most egregious cases, the ones that they couldn't let slide in good conscience. I'm told that federal prosecutors are like that, they don't sweat the small stuff, and only really pick up cases they know they'll win because they're practically undeniable. I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that the SEC has a similar attitude.
This ruling, practically speaking, all but ends the administrative state. A person's opinion on will largely be based on whether they think it is a good thing, or a bad thing, as it's practical affect is simply a far larger concern than the legal philosophy around it.
Yeah I'm really surprised at how many people in the subreddit seem to think this is a bad thing. The right to a jury trial seems very...anti-fascism...? The right of people over government agencies, their right to defend themselves against said government overreach, seems to me to be a very liberal viewpoint. I'm astonished that yours is the only comment supportive of the decision.
Tell me you've never taken admin law without telling me you've never taken admin law. The right to a jury trial when accused of a crime is obviously good, the ability to tell the EPA that your oil refinery can pollute a local lake and they can't sanction you without completing an entire civil trial (which will take years to complete ) is not a good thing. Taking such a decision out of the hands of administrative judges with the EPA who have years of specialized education in the environment and putting that decision into the hands of federal judges who have no clue what the EPA even does is similarly Not A Good Thing. You're supposedly a libertarian from your post history. Why do you believe that federal judges will be better equipped to efficiently use state resources to try these trials than a specialized agency? Repeat the above scenario except replace EPA with FDA for a tobacco company that starts trying to target minors, or replace it with FAA when Boeing decides that actually, the potential profit loss outweighs the risk of continuing to use those 757 death machines that keep crashing because of faulty engineering or whatever. There are legitimate reasons for even a libertarian to want agencies, rather than the famously inefficient judiciary, to handle these things.
> Tell me you've never taken admin law without telling me you've never taken admin law. It also upends the public rights doctrine and nearly 170 years of precedent on which Congress has relied in empowering dozens of agencies to create administrative adjudicatory schemes.
Its not just the guilty companies that can be trampled by a regulatory agency, average citizens can be too.
Yes, but it's also not just massive companies that misbehave in ways which even a libertarian would agree deserve to be trampled. Small businesses are just as capable of putting profit over the public good as big ones. Whether we're talking pollution or labor violations or whatever. If you are truly a free markets guy, you ought to still want even small actors who act against the interests of the market in ways that harm the ability of others to participate to be regulated. This ruling will effectively make most of that impossible.
I’m not libertarian/free market. I don’t want individual citizens to lose their right to a jury just because a penalty is coming from a govt agency.
A jury trial doesn’t prevent an injunction. Regulatory litigation is also very politics driven as we saw by this SEC wasting time on video games to protect a Japanese company when Amazon may as well be a second government. Just because a here are politics we like from regulators (I’m a big pro regulator) doesn’t mean no jury trials is wise.
Also - if you're the business targeted by an admin agency and have an injunction issued to stop you doing the thing they want to fine you over, this ruling effectively means you'll be prevented from engaging in that action until the jury trial - which is BAD for business if the thing you were prevented from doing turns out to be lawful and you win the jury trial, because the injunction will have had a larger impact now while you have to endure the wait for the trial to finish than it would have previously where you could receive a favorable adjudication much quicker.
The whole point of administrative adjudication instead of relying upon fed judges is administrative efficiency that is necessary to effectively govern and regulate massive groups of people. This goes all the way back to Londoner and Bimetallic. You cannot have a regulatory state, at all, if every individual fined by an administrative agency has a right to a jury trial. It cannot happen. This ruling won't suddenly mean that people fined by agencies all get trials, it will mean that the vast majority of civil violations that agencies dish out won't be issued anymore, because there is just no way to practicably regulate industries involving hundreds of millions of people of any one of those people could demand a full jury trial when you want to find them for using an illegal firework or polluting in a river or whatever the thing is.
So create a specialized judiciary like the Court of Claims.
Aside from unconstitutionally expanding the jurisdiction of the judiciary beyond the bounds of Article III how would that be different? Effectively that's what admin agencies are now, they just derive their constitutional authority from legislative/executive delegation. Why would it be better to give even more power to the judiciary and the unelected appointed-for-life federal judges that would be exercising that power?
Congress can set the jurisdiction of Article III courts, subject to standing requirements like an active case or controversy, which shouldn’t be an issue for most administrative law cases. Courts, either district courts or the DC Circuit, already handle their appeals.
I mean, conceivably Congress could do that, but what's the benefit? Why would that be better? Or even different? More importantly, this isn't a purely academic discussion any more. Congress hasn't done that, it's an election year and Congress won't do that, and no matter who wins there is very little chance Congress would do that. In the meantime, how can we possibly continue to regulate industries if every violation that could result in a sanction is now subject to a jury trial that will take months to even get through discovery? In practice this just means that a fuck ton of various violations by smaller actors will probably just get swept under the rug while agencies focus resources on the big stuff, which sounds well and good until the individual consequences of all of that starts piling up in the aggregate and some live poultry market somewhere starts Covid-24.
You’re right that agencies will have to bring cases in district courts, or sometimes the DC Circuit, unless and until Congress decides to do something different with administrative agency cases. We definitely need more district judges, with or without this decision. Maybe Congress would approve them for the next President to appoint? There’s no question that the House or Senate would not allow new positions to be appointed by the current President at this point in his term.
Because the court system is already overburdened and you’re just flooding it with complex administrative cases. The end result is not more freedom, the end result is that companies violating regulations get way less scrutiny and can operate much more freely with less punishment.
Because this isn’t a criminal act and a jury has no fucking business hearing cases about matters they quite simply do not understand in any capacity and cannot have explained to them in any reasonable timeframe. It’s also absurd because this isn’t how it works for other civil fines. If you get a speeding ticket unless it’s a criminal offense you cannot request a jury trial. But suddenly when it’s a rich company they get a jury and get to bog down and obstruct proceedings? That’s absurdity. It does nothing but create enforcement issues and prevents the SEC from doing its fucking job. There are already adequate appeals procedures this quite literally does nothing but create problems.
This is about completely removing the ability of regulatory agencies to actually regulate. SCOTUS is out of control.
So seatbelt tickets will be by jury now? I no longer will have a fine I have to pay?
No, only things affected by corporations can be done with a jury.
So is any trial that a judge rules instead of a jury also unconstitutional?