First Boston, 482 F.3d 372 (5th Cir. 2007), Smith wrote the majority opinion barring securities fraud claims against third parties who aided in securities fraud but did not directly mislead investors. The decision was upheld by the Supreme Court in Stoneridge Investment Partners v. Scientific-Atlanta, 552 U.S. 148 (2008). Deep water drilling Smith was one of three judges on a panel that heard the appeal to Hornbeck Offshore Services LLC v. Salazar, a case challenging the U.S. Department of the Interior's six-month moratorium on exploratory drilling in deep water that was adopted in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the subsequent oil spill. The lower court had struck down the Department of the Interior's moratorium as arbitrary and capricious government action, and the Fifth Circuit panel denied the government's emergency request to stay the lower court's decision pending appeal. Texas House redistricting In November 2011, Smith, sitting on a special three-judge district court, dissented in Perez v. Perry, 835 F. Supp. 2d 209 (W.D. Tex. 2011), in which the majority adopted an interim redistricting map for the Texas House of Representatives. In his dissent, Judge Smith characterized the majority's map as being of the "purest of intentions" but "extreme" and "untethered to the applicable caselaw." Agreeing with Judge Smith, the Supreme Court unanimously vacated the district court's majority opinion in Perry v. Perez, 565 U.S. 388 (2012). Obamacare In April 2012, during oral argument in a Fifth Circuit case involving the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), Smith ordered the Department of Justice to provide his panel of three judges with a three-page, single-spaced report explaining President Obama's views on judicial review. Judge Smith's order was prompted by Obama's recent press conference remarks on a case pending before the Supreme Court in which the Court was considering, among other things, whether to strike down the entire ACA as unconstitutional. Obama had said that if the Supreme Court overturned the ACA, it would be "an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress," and that a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue had not been overturned by the court "going back to the ’30s, pre New Deal," remarks that were criticized by many as historically and legally inaccurate. Though Judge Smith's response and order were criticized by some legal scholars and members of