Disgorgement, in recent years a favored tool of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in its battles against securities fraud, is defined by one lay dictionary as the return of illegal profits under compulsion of court order. See www.merriam-webster.com. Yet the term evaded a more exacting definition three years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court confined itself to decreeing that the remedy is subject to a five-year statute of limitations, but reserved all other inquires for another day. See Kokesh v. S.E.C., 581U.S. ___ (2017).

Those questions have now been answered in Liu v. S.E.C., 591 U.S. ___ (No. 18-1501) (June 22, 2020), where an overwhelming majority of the court confirmed there is statutory authority for the Commission to seek, and for federal courts to bestow, disgorgement as an equitable remedy, within boundaries circumscribed by axioms of equity jurisprudence which have been extant since the founding of the Republic.

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