(Washington, DC)—On October 15, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a suit by two former Exxon employees to enforce a preliminary order by OSHA. The decision was a victory for WLF, which joined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Association of American Railroads, and the National Manufacturers Association on an amicus brief drafted by David Morrell, Jacqueline Holmes, and Ryan Proctor of Jones Day. The Third Circuit held that the district court lacked Article III jurisdiction to act on non-final orders from a dismissed administrative proceeding.
The case arose from an OSHA complaint by two former Exxon employees who alleged that their terminations violated the whistleblower protections of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. After an initial investigation, OSHA agreed with the complainants and ordered their preliminary reinstatement. Exxon then sought de novo hearing before an administrative law judge in the Department of Labor. When the complainants sued to enforce the preliminary order in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, Exxon moved to dismiss the action because Sarbanes-Oxley does not give federal courts jurisdiction to enforce preliminary restatement orders. Agreeing with that construction of the statute, the District Court granted Exxon’s order and dismissed the suit.
In their brief urging affirmance, amici argued that the plain text of Sarbanes-Oxley authorizes judicial enforcement only of final—not preliminary—orders. Statutory context and history reinforce this conclusion. What’s more, plaintiffs’ policy arguments for overriding the statute’s plain meaning improperly imply a cause of action where Congress did not create one—a practice the Supreme Court rejected long ago. Adhering to the statutory text as written also promotes the venerable judicial policy of adopting clear and administrable rules for defining subject-matter jurisdiction.