By Sara Kropf On March 31, 2021, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York asked the court to dismiss the indictment of two defendants in a complex accounting fraud case. The letter request said “we do not believe we can establish beyond a...
By Dan Portnov 2019 ended with Congress trying to tackle insider trading but 2020 begins with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals once again commanding center stage in defining the elements of the offense. In United States v. Blaszczak (issued on December 30, but no...
By Daniel Portnov It’s been a busy 2018 for cryptocurrency enforcement by the SEC. Following statements by Chair Jay Clayton and Co-Director of Enforcement Stephanie Avakian announcing various cryptocurrency concerns, sweeps and initiatives,[1] several recent...
By Dan Portnov The SEC’s Office of Investor Education and Advocacy (“OIEA”) came in hot last week with its HoweyCoin initial coin offering pre-sale – a mock ICO designed to teach cryptocurrency-hungry investors the lesson that some ICOs may be scams. It’s quite...
By Dan Portnov In certain legal (nerd) circles, coining a phrase or term of art is one of the surest ways to achieve immortality – think Tim Wu’s first use of “network neutrality” in a 2003 journal article or Justice Felix Frankfurter’s opinion in Rochin v....
By: Sara Kropf Regular readers of this blog know that I resent when the government forces private industry to do the government’s job. Internal investigations are a good example. Companies spend millions conducting them into possible wrongdoing—hoping for leniency—and...
By: Sara Kropf I’ve written before about the fundamental unfairness of the Department of Justice’s practice of issuing press releases touting indictments but not issuing press releases when the charges are dismissed or the defendant acquitted. It looks like the SEC...
By: Sara Kropf In Part I of the series, I introduced the idea that defense counsel are increasingly fighting back against DOJ in creative ways. In Part II, we talked about Sheldon Silver and his defense counsel's efforts to use DOJ's very public statements against Mr....
By: Sara Kropf Warren “Ken” Paxton, Jr. is the attorney general of Texas. He's had some ups and downs this week, to be sure. On Friday, October 7, 2016, the Eastern District of Texas dismissed all of the securities charges filed by the SEC against him. On Wednesday,...
By: Sara Kropf We usually think about the right to a jury as one for a defendant facing charges. But it’s worth remembering that agencies are people too. Well, at least when it comes to the right to a jury trial in a civil case. In a recent Ninth Circuit opinion, the...