ICAN’s Years-Long Effort Is Forcing a Supreme Court Showdown

Nicolas Morgan
Dec 30, 2025
3 min read

Fair Markets Require Fair Enforcement—and Clear Limits on SEC Power

December 30th, 2025

Dear ICAN Partners,

As you’ve often heard me mention, the SEC has increasingly relied on extreme financial judgments for victimless, technical, or administrative violations – money grabs that have ruined livelihoods, ended careers, and destroyed small businesses. Now, the government is asking the Supreme Court to effectively bless this approach.

Just before the holidays, the federal government asked the United States Supreme Court to weigh in on a case (SEC v. Sripetch) challenging the SEC’s right to take money from people and businesses even when no one was harmed – a practice ICAN and our allies have fought against from day one.

It is the issue at the heart of the first case ICAN ever took on, SEC v. Barry. As you’ll remember, in that case, ICAN represents sales consultants who followed the rules as they understood them—based on guidance from their employer and their employer’s lawyers—caused no investor harm and committed no fraud, and yet were personally targeted for massive monetary judgments in the form of “disgorgement” years later when the SEC went after their employer. Over a decade after the SEC filed its lawsuit, our clients are still fighting for justice, and members of the ICAN team have been by their side for years.

Without the pro bono legal representation ICAN has been able to provide – thanks to generous partners like you – our clients in Barry would have had little choice but to fold, giving the SEC yet another uncontested “win” and further entrenching a system that rewards overreach. Instead, they have been able to fight back.

The years of work we have poured into SEC v. Barry are now converging with SEC v. Sripetch, a case that moved through the Ninth Circuit in parallel with our own. While the SEC alleged fraud in Sripetch, our Barry case—which involves no fraud allegations—presents an even "cleaner" vehicle for the Supreme Court to decide if the SEC can seize funds where there is no identifiable investor harm. To ensure the Justices see this full picture, we recently filed an amicus brief in the Sripetch docket on behalf of the Barry clients, highlighting the national importance of this issue. As we currently seek en banc review in the Ninth Circuit for Barry, we are prepared to bring our case directly to the Supreme Court—either by filing our own petition for certiorari to be heard alongside Sripetch or by serving as merits-stage amici. Our goal is to force the Court to consider these cases together, ensuring the "no-victim" overreach we’ve fought for years finally gets the definitive ruling it deserves

By advancing these cases in parallel and pressing the issue from multiple fronts, ICAN has helped force a reckoning over whether the SEC’s use of disgorgement has drifted far beyond its lawful limits.

That question has only grown more urgent since the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Liu, which placed clear constraints on disgorgement and rejected its use as a punitive tool. Rather than accept those limits, the SEC has spent the past several years testing their boundaries, exploiting divisions among the courts, and deepening uncertainty for individuals and small businesses. ICAN’s long-term strategy—combining direct litigation, appeals, and targeted amicus advocacy—has now brought that unresolved conflict to the Court’s doorstep. When the government filed its request, we recorded a special episode of SEC Roundup explaining what’s at stake and why this moment matters.

As we close out 2025, I want to thank you for making this work possible - and ask that you consider making a year-end donation to allow ICAN to continue staying in these fights for the long haul on issues that rarely make national headlines, even as their consequences are profound. Despite talk of an SEC “retreat,” the reality in the courtroom looks very different, with aggressive enforcement theories still being pressed against individuals who lack the resources to fight back alone. Your continued support is essential to sustaining this work and taking on the next set of cases already moving through the system.