Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will weigh whether to decide what a federal judge called the “the most important separation-of-powers case regarding the President’s appointment and removal powers to reach the courts in the last 20 years.” Law professors Kenneth Starr and Viet Dinh, who worked on the case, have an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, which challenges a powerful, and largely unaccountable, federal agency called the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB).…

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On Friday, a divided appeals court rejected a constitutional challenge to a powerful board set up by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to regulate the accounting industry.  The court’s decision was internally-inconsistent and illogical.  It also provoked a strong dissent from Judge Kavanaugh.  The challenge argued that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, as well as separation-of-powers safeguards.  Eminent legal scholars have questioned the PCAOB’s constitutionality, such as Law Professor Donna Nagy, an expert on securities regulation, and Professor Stephen Bainbridge, a…

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Today, a divided D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-to-1 to uphold a provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, over a strong dissent by Judge Kavanaugh, in the case of Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.   But the court’s decision rests on reasoning that is disturbingly inconsistent.

This case is a constitutional challenge to the PCAOB, the regulatory board set up by Sarbanes-Oxley, as a violation of the Appointments Clause and separation of powers.  The PCAOB is enormously important: The red tape generated by…

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