Mark Chenoweth '99's Blog Post on CPSC and RCO Doctrine

From The Washington Legal Foundation Legal Pulse:

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) opened a mammoth-sized can of worms when it decided to go after former Maxfield and Oberton Holdings CEO Craig Zucker in his personal capacity earlier this year. His transgression? Refusing CPSC’s request tovoluntarily and permanently remove his company’s entire Buckyballs® product line of powerful rare earth magnets from the marketplace. Attorneys Sheila Millar and Kathryn Biszko of Keller and Heckman shred the rationale for the agency’s misguided decision—and question the Administrative Law Judge’s (ALJ) actions to date—in a new WLF Legal Backgrounder.
The authors primarily take issue with suing Zucker personally. “Individuals,” they point out, “do not check their free speech rights at the door when they disagree with agency actions and exercise their rights to object.” One hopes the agency’s decision to pursue Zucker was not motivated to any extent by Zucker’s rejecting the voluntary recall and/or his “Save Our Balls” P.R. campaign which was deeply critical of CPSC’s strong-arm tactics that bankrupted his company. However, the more one reads about this case, the harder it becomes to escape the conclusion that CPSC has not taken kindly to Zucker’s demand that the agency merely meet its statutory obligation to prove a “substantial product hazard” before ordering a mandatory recall.

Read the rest of the post here.