Of Truth, Pragmatism, and Sour Grapes: The Second Circuit’s Decision in SEC v. Citigroup Global Markets

In his 2001 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders Warren Buffett stated, “[Y]ou only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” In the fall of 2008, the tide went out when Lehman Brothers collapsed and credit markets froze. Left exposed were the shoddy—and sometimes fraudulent—practices of participants in the theretofore esoteric industry of structured finance. Since then, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has extracted billions of dollars in settlements from the industry. A frequent enforcement tool of the SEC has been the consent judgment, a hybrid settlement that contains injunctive elements. This Note examines the role of the SEC in relation to Article III courts, specifically in the context of consent judgments. Drawing on the rich history of equitable practice and the doctrine of the separation of powers, this Note argues that SEC v. Citigroup Global Markets was wrongly decided in that it excessively curtails the role of district courts in determining the propriety of equitable relief. The opinion not only contradicts longstanding precedent, but also goes too far in ceding a core function of the judiciary to the SEC. This Note shows that, as a result, the decision serves to undermine fundamental goals of the securities laws

Cascades and Dissipative Anomalies in Relativistic Fluid Turbulence

We develop first-principles theory of relativistic fluid turbulence at high Reynolds and P\'eclet numbers. We follow an exact approach pioneered by Onsager, which we explain as a non-perturbative application of the principle of renormalization-group invariance. We obtain results very similar to those for non-relativistic turbulence, with hydrodynamic fields in the inertial-range described as distributional or "coarse-grained" solutions of the relativistic Euler equations. These solutions do not, however, satisfy the naive conservation-laws of smooth Euler solutions but are afflicted with dissipative anomalies in the balance equations of internal energy and entropy. The anomalies are shown to be possible by exactly two mechanisms, local cascade and pressure-work defect. We derive "4/5th-law"-type expressions for the anomalies, which allow us to characterize the singularities (structure-function scaling exponents) required for their non-vanishing. We also investigate the Lorentz covariance of the inertial-range fluxes, which we find is broken by our coarse-graining regularization but which is restored in the limit that the regularization is removed, similar to relativistic lattice quantum field theory. In the formal limit as speed of light goes to infinity, we recover the results of previous non-relativistic theory. In particular, anomalous heat input to relativistic internal energy coincides in that limit with anomalous dissipation of non-relativistic kinetic energy