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FDA Publishes SPL Guide for MoCRA Facility Registration and Product Listings

Client Alert | 1 min read | 11.01.23

On October 13, 2023 he FDA announced that two of the requirements set forth in the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022 (MoCRA)— facility registration and product listing—will be included as part of the Structured Product Labeling (SPL) framework. SPL is a document formatting standard adopted by FDA for exchanging product-related information. 

The FDA previously developed Cosmetics Direct, a draft electronic portal for submissions under MoCRA. Companies who will use Cosmetics Direct may submit facility registration information and/or product listings by importing an SPL document, which contains user friendly data entry forms, performs initial validation, creates and saves the SPL submission, and submits the SPL document to FDA for internal processing.

In order to assist those who will be using and uploading SPL documents, the FDA also published a SPL Implementation Guide with technical conformance criteria for SPL documents. According to this Guide, importing an existing SPL document will be useful for bulk submissions, and users will be able to copy a successfully uploaded SPL document as a starting point for their own submission.

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Client Alert | 3 min read | 06.12.26

DOJ Guidance Backs Away From Disparate Impact Liability

On June 9, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a formal opinion concluding that the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission’s (EEOC) existing interpretations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) disparate-impact liability, including the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP), are unconstitutional. According to the opinion, EEOC’s prior interpretations contemplate liability based on disproportionately adverse effects alone, without regard to an employer’s likely intent, rather than treating disparate impact as an evidentiary mechanism to “smoke out” intentional discrimination. DOJ found that this approach functions as a “qualified racial-proportionality mandate” that places “a racial thumb on the scales, often requiring employers to evaluate the racial outcomes of their policies, and to make decisions based on (because of) those racial outcomes.” The opinion fulfills one mandate of Executive Order 14281, which rejected disparate-impact liability insofar as it “creates a near insurmountable presumption that unlawful discrimination exists wherever there are any differences in outcomes among different [demographic groups].”...