George Conway III has been cataloguing the reverberations of Morrison v. National Australia Bank, 130 S. Ct. 2869, ever since he successfully argued the case at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010, persuading the court to rein in the extraterritorial reach of U.S. securities law. Since then Conway, a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, has seen the decision used to curtail all sorts of claims involving overseas conduct, from antitrust to racketeering.
Now Conway is looking to ensure that Morrison‘s effects also extend to criminal conductan area where the ruling’s holding against extraterritoriality has butted up against a much older Supreme Court decision. On Sept. 25, Conway and his colleagues at Wachtell filed a 30-page amicus brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on behalf of the New York City Bar, arguing that federal prosecutors misinterpreted both Morrison and the Supreme Court’s 1922 decision in United States v. Bowman, 260 U.S. 94, while pressing charges that a group of brokers fraudulently manipulated a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange.
