Regulation

Part One of this article, last month, examined the liability involved with social media and e-mail use. Part Two discusses implementing compliant and defensible workplace policies.

In City of Ontario v. Quon, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a government employer's search of an employee's communications on an employer-issued pager was reasonable under the circumstances and, therefore, did not violate the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. The Court's narrowly tailored decision underscores that cases in the area of employee privacy will continue to be highly fact-sensitive.

In a case of first impression, SEC v. Jenkins, the United States District Court for the District of Arizona refused to dismiss an action brought by the SEC seeking reimbursement of bonuses and securities trading profits from a corporate CEO under Section 304 of SOX.

On July 21, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was signed into law by President Obama. It contains several provisions that are specific to public companies, the more significant of which are discussed below.

Record-breaking budget shortfalls have caused states to search outside the box for revenue-raising tools that many argue are unconstitutional and violate the consumer privacy that online shoppers have come to expect. Today, with so much of retail activity conducted over the Internet, states are struggling with revenue losses stemming from this constitutional restriction. States are reacting by becoming ever more creative in their attempts to capture this lost revenue by adopting new laws aimed at circumventing the Commerce Clause restrictions.

While the ACLU and other nonprofit legal groups have been declared exempt from a strict proposal for regulating lawyer Web sites, Florida's largest law firms are starting to band together to protest the regulations, largely on First Amendment grounds.

Sweepstakes and contests have become popular in mobile promotion. However, because sweepstakes and contests are highly regulated, a marketer using a mobile device must comply not only with mobile-messaging laws and regulations, but also with those governing sweepstakes and contests. Indeed, text messaging as a sweepstakes-entry method has brought much consumer litigation in recent years.

The Supreme Court has sided with former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling in limiting the use of a federal fraud law that has been a favorite of white-collar crime prosecutors.