Law360, New York ( November 27, 2013, 5:55 PM EST) -- In recent weeks, federal courts at all levels have been forced to grapple with a range of unsettled issues resulting from ambiguities in the whistleblower retaliation provisions of both the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. These issues include the right to a jury trial in retaliation cases; the extent to which the Sarbanes-Oxley antiretaliation provisions protect employees of companies that are not publicly traded but are retained as contractors by publicly-traded companies; whether the Dodd-Frank anti-retaliation provisions protect whistleblowers who report their suspicions only internally to their companies rather than to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; and the extraterritorial reach of the anti-retaliation provisions....