In the morning hours of Aug. 22, law firms, boardrooms and compliance professionals around the globe were humming with anticipation (or perhaps more accurately, laboring under a chilly frisson of dread). The cause for this collective anxiety was the SEC’s much-anticipated – and much-delayed – announcement of the Dodd-Frank Act’s final disclosure and reporting rules concerning “conflict minerals.” This article, by Partner T. Markus Funk, examines the contours of the new rules from a retail perspective, and tries to answer the question of whether one man’s well-intentioned humanitarian effort has once again become another’s costly export of moral imperatives for difficult-to-achieve public policy objectives.