Conglomerate Blog: Business, Law, Economics & Society

There's two interesting cases yet to be decided by the Supreme Court involving business; they will be decided on Monday, and just so you're ready with your lunchroom chatter, we, a rather Supreme Court phobic blog, wanted to point you to some Courtophillic science.

The biggest case remaining asks whether the PCAOB, the SOx accounting supervisor, is constitutional. My own view on this sort of separations of powers constitutionality issue is that the Court would never do something mortal to an agency that truly mattered. The SEC is completely safe, so is the Fed, as are their many instrumentalities. The problem is that the PCAOB has never established its necessity (so it made the claim that it was like a division of the SEC, which has plenty of divisions that don't do anything useful whatsoever, but aren't at risk of being found to be an unconstitutional limitation on the power of the President). Tom Goldstein, a prescient Court watcher, predicts that CJ Roberts is writing the opinion:

At oral argument the Chief Justice asked no questions of counsel to the plaintiffs and was hostile to the defense of the statute, asking numerous questions. For example, he explained: “So you have got ‘for cause’ squared, and that’s – that’s a significant limitation that Humphrey’s Executor didn’t recognize and Morrison didn’t recognize.”

I therefore predict that the Court will reverse in Free Enterprise Fund, holding the structure of the PCAOB unconstitutional.

Good news for Barack Obama, if true. We've opined a lot on this case, and even had an exchange of views on it. Here's PCAOB skeptic Donna Nagy, Bob Thompson, Gordon, noting the constitutional problems in 2005 (!), and me.

Possibly even more important from a market cap perspective, is Bilski, the business methods patent decision, a matter we have left to the patent blogs. Here's what Goldstein predicts:

I ultimately predict that the Bilski majority opinion will be authored by Justice Stevens and that the decision will be very significant in its narrowing of the scope of method patents. I expect that the delay in resolving the case will have arisen not from disagreement over whether this particular invention is patentable – I think the Court will unanimously hold that it isn’t – but over the scope of the rule.

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There's two interesting cases yet to be decided by the Supreme Court involving business; they will be decided on Monday, and just so you're ready with your lunchroom chatter, we, a rather Supreme Court phobic blog, wanted to point you to some Courtophillic science.

The biggest case remaining asks whether the PCAOB, the SOx accounting supervisor, is constitutional. My own view on this sort of separations of powers constitutionality issue is that the Court would never do something mortal to an agency that truly mattered. The SEC is completely safe, so is the Fed, as are their many instrumentalities. The problem is that the PCAOB has never established its necessity (so it made the claim that it was like a division of the SEC, which has plenty of divisions that don't do anything useful whatsoever, but aren't at risk of being found to be an unconstitutional limitation on the power of the President). Tom Goldstein, a prescient Court watcher, predicts that CJ Roberts is writing the opinion:

At oral argument the Chief Justice asked no questions of counsel to the plaintiffs and was hostile to the defense of the statute, asking numerous questions. For example, he explained: “So you have got ‘for cause’ squared, and that’s – that’s a significant limitation that Humphrey’s Executor didn’t recognize and Morrison didn’t recognize.”

I therefore predict that the Court will reverse in Free Enterprise Fund, holding the structure of the PCAOB unconstitutional.

Good news for Barack Obama, if true. We've opined a lot on this case, and even had an exchange of views on it. Here's PCAOB skeptic Donna Nagy, Bob Thompson, Gordon, noting the constitutional problems in 2005 (!), and me.

Possibly even more important from a market cap perspective, is Bilski, the business methods patent decision, a matter we have left to the patent blogs. Here's what Goldstein predicts:

I ultimately predict that the Bilski majority opinion will be authored by Justice Stevens and that the decision will be very significant in its narrowing of the scope of method patents. I expect that the delay in resolving the case will have arisen not from disagreement over whether this particular invention is patentable – I think the Court will unanimously hold that it isn’t – but over the scope of the rule.

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