SCOTUS Shorts

ATTORNEY: H. ADAM PRUSSIN
POMERANTZ MONITOR JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

The Supreme Court has just issued two very significant rulings. In the first one, it granted certiorari to review U.S. v. Salman, a criminal insider trading prosecution. The case turns on the question of what sort of personal benefit, if any, a “tippee” has to give to his “tipper” in exchange for the inside information before the tippee can be liable for trading on it. This issue received national attention a few months ago when the Second Circuit gave its answer to this question in U.S. v. Newman; but the Supremes denied cert in that case.

In Salman, defendant Salman received the inside information from a close friend who, in turn, had heard it from his brother. The question is whether the personal relationship between the two brothers in itself satisfies the “personal benefit” requirement for insider trading, or whether the government also has to show that the tippee brother gave an additional, tangible benefit to his brother in exchange for the information. In its decision, the 9th Circuit held that no additional tangible benefit, beyond the personal relationship, was required. In Newman, the Second Circuit previously held otherwise. Curiously, the 9th Circuit’s opinion was written by Judge Rakoff, a District Court judge sitting by designation. Judge Rakoff sits in the Southern District of New York, which is part of the Second Circuit. Through this quirk of fate, Judge Rakoff got another circuit court to disagree, publicly, with the Second Circuit’s Newman decision, which is binding on him when he sits as a district judge in New York.

In the Supreme Court’s second ruling, Campbell Ewold, it struck a blow against a tactic increasingly used by defendants in class actions: trying to “moot” the claims of the class representative by offering to pay all of his claimed damages. If the representative’s claim is mooted (i.e., satisfied), his individual claim would be dismissed, and the class would have no representative. If the class could not find another representative, the whole class action would be dismissed. If this could work, the class action device could be eviscerated.

Fortunately, the Supremes said no, finding that a rejected offer of settlement does not wipe out the representative’s claim; but, unfortunately, they left open the question of whether this tactic could work if, instead of just offering to pay the claimed damages, the defendant actually pays the money into an account for the benefit of the plaintiff, such as an escrow account or the clerk’s office. To resolve that question, we may need “Campbell Ewold 2.”