Page:Axon Enterprise v. FTC.pdf/2

2 review scheme specified in the Securities Exchange Act—“administrative review followed by judicial review in a federal court of appeals”—“implicitly divest[s] district courts of jurisdiction” over “challenges to SEC proceedings,” including Cochran’s constitutional ones. Likewise, the district court in Axon’s case found that the FTC Act’s comparable review scheme displaces §1331 jurisdiction for claims concerning the FTC’s adjudications. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s dismissal of Axon’s constitutional challenges to the FTC proceeding, concluding that the claims were the type that fell within the FTC Act’s review scheme. But the en banc Fifth Circuit disagreed as to the equivalent SEC question, finding that Cochran’s claim would not receive “meaningful judicial review” in a court of appeals; that the claim was “wholly collateral to the Exchange Act’s statutory-review scheme”; and that the claim fell “outside the SEC’s expertise.”

The Court has twice held specific claims to fit within a statutory review scheme, based on the Thunder Basin factors. In Thunder Basin itself, a coal company subject to the Mine Act filed suit in district court instead of asserting its claims—as a statutory scheme prescribed—first before a mine safety commission and then (if needed) a court of appeals. The crux of the dispute concerned the company’s refusal to provide employee-designated union officials with access to the workplace in accordance with the Mine Act. The company also objected on