The U.S. Supreme Court – in a short, concise, unanimous opinion – has ruled that to assert Section 11 claims against Slack in connection with the company’s June 2019 direct listing, the plaintiff must plead and prove that he purchased shares pursuant to Slack’s allegedly misleading registration statement. Slack had offered both registered and unregistered shares in the direct listing. Even though the plaintiff had not alleged that the shares he purchased were registered shares, the Ninth Circuit had allowed the plaintiff’s claims to stand. The Supreme Court vacated the Ninth Circuit’s order and remanded the case to the district court. At a minimum, the Supreme Court’s ruling means Section 11 plaintiffs must plead that their shares are traceable to the offering. The practical implication of the Court’s ruling may be that the companies conducting direct listings cannot be sued under Section 11. A copy of the Court’s June 1, 2023, opinion can be found here.
The case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court was to consider the applicability of the PSLRA’s discovery stay in state court ’33 Act actions has been suspended by the Court at the parties’ request. The parties apparently have reached a tentative settlement of the underlying matter and jointly requested that the Court hold the matter in abeyance, pending the parties’ efforts to complete settlement documentation.
In a little noticed-development last week, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the petition for a writ of certiorari in Hagan v. Khoja, in which former officials of a bankrupt pharmaceutical company sought to have the Court review a decision by the Ninth Circuit to revive a securities class action lawsuit against them. Had the petition been granted, the Court would have been called upon to consider the controversial question of whether public companies have a duty to update prior disclosures that were accurate when made. The Court’s cert denial leaves the Ninth Circuit’s ruling standing and the questions surrounding the existence and requirements of a duty to update remain unsettled. The Court’s May 20, 2019 order can be found 
On January 4, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court granted cert in a case that will determine what a plaintiff must plead in order to state a claim for false statements or omissions in connection with a tender offer under 
I have had this perception for several years now that the U.S. Supreme Court recently has been particularly keen to take up securities cases. It turns out that this perception has a basis in objective fact. A 
As I noted at the beginning of the U.S. Supreme Court’s current term in my 
For almost the entire time that there have even been federal securities laws, the U.S. Supreme Court only rarely and infrequently agreed to take up cases arising securities cases. Until recently, years would pass between the times that securities cases appeared on the Supreme Court’s docket. For some reason, beginning around the middle of the last decade, the Court has become increasingly willing to take up securities cases. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2017-2018 term, which commences on Monday, is no exception to this recent trend. There are three important securities cases on the Court’s docket for the upcoming term, and these cases could have, both individually and collectively, a significant impact on many securities law cases and on securities litigation in general.
President Trump’s nomination of Tenth Circuit Justice Neil Gorsuch to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by the late Justice Antonin Scalia has attracted a great deal of commentary and raised a host of questions about the proposed new Justice’s views on a variety of different subjects. In the following guest post, attorneys from the Paul Weiss law firm take a look at the proposed Justice’s past writings and opinions on securities litigation and agency deference questions. I would like to thank the Paul Weiss attorneys for allowing me to publish their guest post on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this site’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is the Paul Weiss attorneys’ guest post.