Last month, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an FTC effort to control lawyers, and rendered a decision that favors the rights of individual states to regulate lawyers. As reported by the ABA here, the court held that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was never intended by Congress to apply to lawyers, and as described by the ABA report, reasoned as follows:

Borrowing a colorful metaphor from a Supreme Court opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, “Congress does not hide elephants in mouseholes,” the appeals court said, “[W]e would have to conclude that Congress not only had hidden a rather large elephant in a rather obscure mousehole, but had buried the ambiguity in which the pachyderm lurks beneath an incredibly deep mound of specificity, none of which bears the footprints of the beast or any indication that Congress even suspected its presence.”