A federal circuit judge spent an hour picking apart the legal challenge to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission-approved, Nasdaq-created diversity rule that requires additional governance disclosures for certain companies.

“No one would deny there’s talent everywhere in America, and it’s just never been recognized, and that tends to correspond to underprivileged minorities,” said Judge Stephen A. Higginson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit during oral arguments Monday. “They’ve never had the chance to work in Wall Street board rooms. All this rule is saying, let’s identify talent that hasn’t been identified before … let’s just have the board disclose what their background is. Why isn’t this healthy information?”