Law Commons^™

Statutory Findings And Insider Trading Regulation, Steve Thel

Vanderbilt Law Review

Insider trading has presented some of the most unsettled and contentious issues of corporate law. These issues have been particularly difficult because often it has not even been clear whether the law forbids those who possess material nonpublic information to trade securities. Even as commentators have debated whether insider trading ought to be forbidden, the courts have disagreed on the more basic question of when and whether such trading is, in fact, forbidden.

The law governing insider trading has been unclear because the scope of the SEC's authority to regulate insider trading has been unclear. For a while, courts uniformly …