Dear House Judiciary Committee: In Questioning William Barr, Employ the Ethics Complaint That 27 Distinguished DC Lawyers Filed Wednesday

FREDERICK BARON, DENNIS AFTERGUT, AUSTIN SARAT

Frederick Baron, former associate deputy attorney general and director of the Executive Office for National Security in the Department of Justice, Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, and Austin Sarat, Associate Provost and Associate Dean of the Faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence & Political Science at Amherst College, call upon the House Judiciary Committee to carefully read the ethics complaint by 27 distinguished DC lawyers against William Barr before questioning him today, July 28, 2020.

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Goode v. Commissioner of Social Security

Docket: 18-14771

Opinion Date: July 28, 2020

Judge: Jordan

Areas of Law: Public Benefits

The Eleventh Circuit vacated the district court's order affirming the denial of plaintiff's application for benefits under the Social Security Act. The court agreed with plaintiff that substantial evidence does not support the ALJ's finding that plaintiff could perform a job that exists in significant numbers in the national economy. The court held that the vocational expert's testimony as to available jobs, on which the ALJ relied, was significantly and admittedly flawed. In this case, the vocational expert used the wrong Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) group code to determine whether there are a significant number of jobs in the national economy that plaintiff could perform. Furthermore, even if the court overlooked this foundational problem, the numbers that the vocational expert cited from the wrong SOC group code substantially overstated the number of available bakery worker jobs that plaintiff could perform. Accordingly, the court remanded for further proceedings.