Legal News

Jet Propulsion Lab case to go before U.S. Supreme Court

By Richard Binder

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments tomorrow in a case involving 28 government contractors at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who object to what they say are unrestricted and overly intrusive background checks.

The plaintiffs, who are engineers and scientists at the lab in Pasadena, say that their work is low-risk and unclassified, and therefore security clearance isn't required. The Justice Department has responded that the background checks are "minimally intrusive."

The suit was initiated in 2007.  After the Federal District Court in Los Angeles dismissed it, the Ninth Circuit sided with the scientists and issued an emergency injunction putting a halt to the checks.  The federal government appealed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

JPL is run by the California Institute of Technology and is famous for for sending unmanned spacecraft to Mars and the outer solar system.

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Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on October 04, 2010 (boomark / email).