Michael J. Edney

Michael Edney is a partner in the Washington DC office of Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP and its  white collar criminal defense practice.  He defends executives and corporations from federal Government overreach, including criminal prosecutions and agency enforcement actions.  He has taken on the alphabet soup of Washington’s regulatory agencies—from the Justice Department to the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to the Federal Trade Commission to the Food and Drug Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency.

In addition to his criminal defense practice, Mike regularly brings actions challenging government agency regulations as illegal and unconstitutional before they are enforced.  He has sued government agencies and reversed their attempted regulations seeking to upend the energy, financial and tobacco industries, among others.  Many of the regulations Mike has convinced the courts to reverse would have arbitrarily ended hundreds of businesses, absent the courts’ intervention. 

A sample of Mike’s recent cases is described below:

• Secured the vacatur of an industry-wide health warnings regulation on First Amendment and Administrative Procedure Act grounds through a unanimous decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
• Secured the reversal of the Food and Drug Administration’s comprehensive and industry-threatening regulation of premium cigars before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. He then argued against the FDA’s appeal of that decision, leading to a unanimous decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit holding that the FDA made serious errors and vacating the regulation.
• Obtained the reversal a Securities and Exchange Commission effort to impose a prejudgment receivership seizing all the assets of a prominent real estate developer through a unanimous decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
• Secured the reversal of a Commodity Futures Trading Commission effort to end the PredictIt political event market, through a 2-1 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
• Secured the reversal through a writ of mandamus of a government effort to transfer challenges to its regulatory actions to federal courts in Washington, through a unanimous decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
• Vindicated the First Amendment rights of multiple newspapers and publications against claims of libel and to court records, including through a victory in the Arizona Supreme Court.
• Prevailed in a months-long criminal jury trial against a business executive, with the jury refusing to convict the defendant on any of the Government’s dozens of wire and government contracting fraud charges.
• Secured the reversal of several Treasury and Commerce Department sanctions and designations of companies and individuals, including through litigation challenging them.
• Serves as lead counsel in challenging numerous federal Government administration regulations of the energy and financial industries.
• Challenged and obtained judicial relief against numerous federal, state, and local statutes and regulations seeking to compel commercial speech, to restrict the ability to advertise, or otherwise to encroach on First Amendment rights.
• Successfully negotiated ends to numerous government investigations, including to what was then the largest combined corporate Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and trade sanctions investigation in American history.
• Represented clients before the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the National Security Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Reserve Board, congressional committees, and other government entities.

• Legal 500 US, Dispute Resolution-International Litigation (2017)