Washington, D.C., April 20, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed an amicus curiae brief today in Lek Securities Corporation v. SEC at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. NCLA urges the D.C. Circuit to send the Commission a strong message of condemnation as the remedy for an all-too-common example of SEC’s denying Americans due process of law. After the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) spent several years investigating and then imposed punitive disciplinary sanctions against Lek Securities in 2015, SEC took ten more years to make any kind of ruling on Lek’s administrative appeal from those sanctions. SEC has offered no explanation whatsoever for this egregious adjudicatory delay.
Sadly, SEC quite often spends years failing to decide appeals of sanctions by NYSE and other self-regulatory organizations (“SROs”)—nominally private, nongovernmental corporations that regulate the financial services industry and which the Commission purportedly supervises. SEC’s chronic delays in adjudicating appeals from SRO sanctions systematically and unlawfully block securities firms and professionals who have been severely punished by SROs from obtaining timely Article III judicial review of their punishments. These persistent delays violate regulated parties’ rights to due process of law under the Fifth Amendment, and to timely agency action under the Administrative Procedure Act. SEC’s recurring delays also break the internal rules it has set for itself limiting how long the agency has to decide appeals of SRO sanctions.
SEC’s systematic failure to perform the basic adjudicatory duties assigned to it by Congress in a timely manner is utterly unacceptable, and it inflicts extended financial and reputational harm on countless Americans who must wait endlessly for decisions in their regulatory appeals from punitive SRO sanctions. This circumstance is especially disturbing because some of the most severe SRO sanctions—including banning securities professionals from the industry forever—remain in force as SEC dithers without making its final, appealable decisions.
NCLA released the following statements:
“Lek’s adjudicative experience is a textbook example of what I call SEC’s version of the Hotel California—ensnared litigants can check out but they can never leave. Unless and until courts finally hold SEC accountable for this abysmal dereliction of duty, we can only expect it to continue, business as usual.”
— Russ Ryan, Senior Litigation Counsel, NCLA
“It is time for SEC to finally get its comeuppance over its obnoxious history of sitting on appeals. Tossing out these sanctions would be a fitting rebuke to SEC.”
— Mark Chenoweth, President and Chief Legal Officer, NCLA
For more information visit the amicus page here.
ABOUT NCLA
NCLA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group founded by prominent legal scholar Philip Hamburger to protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the Administrative State. NCLA’s public-interest litigation and other pro bono advocacy strive to tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies and to foster a new civil liberties movement that will help restore Americans’ fundamental rights.
Joe Martyak New Civil Liberties Alliance 703-403-1111 joe.martyak@ncla.legal
