⚖ Oral Arguments, with Context

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit hears an appeal in Bozorgi versus Cassava Sciences. The appellants are the defendants below: the company and three of its current and former executives. They are challenging an order certifying a class of securities fraud plaintiffs under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure twenty-three. Two requirements are in dispute. First, did the stock trade in an efficient market, so that the fraud-on-the-market presumption of reliance applies to every class member? And second, did the plaintiffs offer a damages methodology capable of separating injury caused by the alleged misrepresentations from other price movements? Cassava Sciences is a clinical-stage biotechnology company that was developing an Alzheimer's drug candidate called simufilam. Appellants say the stock rose roughly eighteen hundred percent over the first seven months of two thousand twenty-one, and that it behaved like a meme stock, driven by social media attention and detached from news about the company, which they say makes reliance and damages unsuitable for class treatment. The class calls that a false premise, and the district court rejected it in August of two thousand twenty-five, when Judge David Ezra of the Western District of Texas certified the class. After the appeal was filed, the parties reached a settlement of thirty-one and a quarter million dollars, which the district court has not yet approved, and the parties now dispute whether this interlocutory review remains live or has been rendered moot.

Bozorgi v. Cassava Sciences (No. 25-50855) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, argued August 3, 2026.