The Veeck case was appealed to the US Supreme court. After agreeing to hear the case, the Supremes let the ruling of the Appellate court stand.
While perhaps not as definitive as the Court formally saying "We rule the same way," this is certainly more definitive than had the Court declined to hear it at all.
I sure would hate to be the one to argue to a future Court that the issue was not settled in the Veeck case.
I can certainly see that the next effort by the code-writing groups will be to try to muddy the waters; that is, they will try to argue that their codes were somehow adopted "by reference" without actually becoming part of the law. They might even attempt to place language in the codes to this effect. Again, I would not want to be the one to argue that point.
The code bodies are trying to have it both ways; they want everyone to adopt their "model" codes ... yet retain control over them. That's why the Veeck decision is so critical.
Likewise, there have been several instances of such organisations being manipulated for the commercial advantage of one of their members. At least two of these cases have been addressed by the US Supreme Court .... to the distress of the code groups!
With all these problems, the simple fact remains that the OSHA statute does mention 70E by name, if only as a resource to be consulted. One must consider this when one chooses to deviate from 70E.
