The Supreme Court was divided in the Lawson v. FMR LLC case. They still issued their decision this week and ruled that the anti-retaliation protection provided to whistleblowers by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 applies to the employees in private companies that hold contracts with public companies. Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kennedy, and Justice Alito, dissented. Justice Ginsburg wrote the decision for the majority along with Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Chief Justice Roberts. Justices Scalia and Thomas were part of the majority, but they wrote a separate dissent. The appeals court argued that the provision applied only to the employees of public companies and not private contractors. The statutory text states, “no public company…or any…contractor…of such company may [retaliate] against an employee…because of [SOX-protected activity].” In his decision, Justice Ginsburg describes the goals of the SOX, to safeguard public companies investors and to restore trust in the financial markets. This mistrust is due to companies like Enron. The protection of employees makes it much more likely that someone would come forward as a ‘whistleblower’ and to make companies more transparent. The Court sided with the whistleblowers and Ginsburg’s decision outlines that they took SOX’s broad goals into account and interpreted the statue in a way that remedies the harms it has addressed. The defendant companies argued that Congress only wanted to protect a public company that would retain an outside contract to avoid the statutory anti-retaliation provision. To back this up they referenced George Clooney’s character from the movie, Up in the Air. In it, he is an ax-wielding specialist and the term ‘contractor’ was included to only address the ax-wielding specialist, according to the defendant employers. This is probably the first time George Clooney has come up in a Supreme Court hearing. At the end of the day, the court ruled in favor of a broad interpretation of the anti-retaliation provision, thus protecting whistle-blowers who are contracted by public companies.