CASE
SUMMARY
NCLA filed amicus curiae briefs supporting Axon Enterprise Inc.in the body camera company’s fight to keep its constitutional claims against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in federal court. NCLA’s initial brief solely addressed the “Tentative Ruling” issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, which concluded that federal courts do not have jurisdiction to evaluate a facial challenge brought under the U.S. Constitution.
As NCLA argued in its Lucia, Cochran, and Gibson cases against the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), defendants have a due process right not to endure hearings in front of constitutionally defective tribunals. The Supreme Court ruled as much in Lucia v. SEC in 2018. Axon Enterprise vindicated a similar right against FTC and to do so relied on rulings such as the preliminary injunction that NCLA obtained for client Michelle Cochran in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
NCLA contended that the District of Arizona should retain jurisdiction to discharge its Article III powers and address these threshold issues going to the constitutional defects in the tribunal itself, which FTC had no authority to address and where delay would have irreparably harmed Axon.