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Diana Lloyd and Kevin Ma on Anti-Shredding Fish Ruling

View “Yates: A Welcome End to Prosecutorial ‘Fishing’ Expedition”

Diana Lloyd and Kevin Ma wrote “Yates: A Welcome End to Prosecutorial ‘Fishing’ Expedition” in Securities Law360, where they discuss the supreme court’s final decision in the Yates v. United States case.  The court ruled that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s “anti-shredding” provision could not be extended to all tangible objects – this includes the undersized fish that Yates had his crew toss overboard to avoid punishment.  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s plurality opinion held that a “tangible object” under §1519 “must be one used to record or preserve information” and rejected the government’s argument that the words of § 1519 “support reading the provision as a general ban on the spoliation of evidence, covering all physical items that might be relevant to any matter under federal investigation.”  This also appeared in the Appellate, Environmental and White Collar sections of Law360

Ms. Lloyd has been covering this case from the beginning and has written two other articles in Law360 that report on the progression of this case.  She has also recently provided commentary regarding the outcome of Yates v. United States in “Attorneys React to High Court’s Sarbanes-Oxley ‘Fish’ Ruling” in Securities Law360, where she describes the decision as “a welcome ruling for those concerned about the government overreaching to apply certain statutes to criminalize behavior beyond what one would reasonably understand to be prohibited.”  This also appeared in the Appellate, Environmental, Florida and White Collar sections of Law360