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Full-Text Articles in Law
Fighting Freestyle: The First Amendment, Fairness, And Corporate Reputation, Rebecca Tushnet
Fighting Freestyle: The First Amendment, Fairness, And Corporate Reputation, Rebecca Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
There are three distinct groups who might want to engage in speech about commercial entities or to constrain those commercial entities from making particular claims of their own. Competitors may sue each other for false advertising, consumers may sue businesses, and government regulators may impose requirements on what businesses must and may not say. In this context, this Article will evaluate a facially persuasive but ultimately misguided claim about corporate speech: that because consumers regularly get to say nasty things about corporations under the lax standards governing defamation of public figures, corporations must be free to make factual claims subject …
The Sec And The Madoff Scandal: Three Narratives In Search Of A Story, Donald C. Langevoort
The Sec And The Madoff Scandal: Three Narratives In Search Of A Story, Donald C. Langevoort
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This essay, part of a symposium on narrative in corporate law, considers various portrayals of the complicity of the SEC in the Bernard Madoff scandal--including the Commission's own Inspector General's report issued in September 2009. It considers possible explanations (revolving door problems, incompetence and sloth, etc.) but suggests that the story is deeper and more frustrating, arising out of the relative poverty in which the SEC operates, which in turn leads to habits of thought and action that leave too much unnoticed and undone. The interesting question, then: why the poverty? The essay concludes with a political explanation. While by …