December 19, 2024
In the past two weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed as “improvidently granted” — an order colloquially called a DIG — two securities class actions, Nvidia Corp. v. Investors, and Facebook Inc. v. Amalgamated Bank. DIGs are rare and are issued only when the Supreme Court realizes it shouldn’t have taken a case at the outset.
Dismissing two securities cases in such close succession, both of which presented significant risks to investor protections, is not only a procedural anomaly — it’s a necessary course correction.
The petitioners’ questions presented in both the Facebook and Nvidia cases were flawed — mischaracterizing existing law, purported circuit splits, the facts of the cases and the lower courts’ decisions.
The Supreme Court’s decisions to dismiss these cases maintain securities law pleading standards, preventing them from being unfairly tilted in favor of corporate defendants. The stakes in both cases were immense: The petitioners — Nvidia and Meta — in both cases sought rulings that would have significantly weakened securities laws and undermined investors’ ability to hold corporations accountable for fraud.
Read Justices Rightly Corrected Course in Nvidia and Facebook.