Publications

On April 3, 2017, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia entered a final judgment in the litigation challenging the Dodd-Frank mandated rule of the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) that requires public companies to investigate and disclose the origin of certain minerals (“conflict minerals”) found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (“DRC”) and countries bordering the DRC. In accordance with the 2014 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the district court declared that the SEC’s conflict minerals rule and the statutory provision on which it is based “violate the First Amendment to the extent that the Statute and the Rule require regulated entities to report to the Commission and to state on their websites that any of their products have not been found to be ‘DRC conflict free.’” The court thus held “unlawful and set[] aside” the conflict minerals rule, “only to the extent that it requires regulated entities” to disclose “that any of their products have not been found to be ‘DRC conflict free,’” and remanded the rule to the SEC.