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Georgetown University Law Center

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Full-Text Articles in Securities Law

The Social Construction Of Sarbanes-Oxley, Donald C. Langevoort Jan 2007

The Social Construction Of Sarbanes-Oxley, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The closer one looks at SOX and its origins in the financial scandals of the early 2000s, the blurrier the picture, which lets commentators see what they want to see and draw inferences accordingly. That is why social construction is so crucial. My aim in this paper is to illuminate the social nature of SOX's diffusion into practice. I will leave to the reader the judgment about whether this has been or will be good or bad, and for whom. If I seem to challenge SOX's critics more than its supporters, it is because the critics have been more venomous …


Rules, Principles, And The Accounting Crisis In The United States, William W. Bratton Jan 2004

Rules, Principles, And The Accounting Crisis In The United States, William W. Bratton

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Securities Exchange Commission move too quickly when they prod the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the standard setter for US GAAP, to move immediately to a principles-based system. Priorities respecting reform of corporate reporting in the US need to be ordered more carefully. Incentive problems impairing audit performance should be solved first through institutional reform insulating the audit from the negative impact of rent-seeking and solving adverse selection problems otherwise affecting audit practice. So long as auditor independence and management incentives respecting accounting treatments remain suspect, the US reporting system holds out no actor plausibly positioned …


Panel Presentation: Securities Regulation And Corporate Responsibility, Donald C. Langevoort Jan 2003

Panel Presentation: Securities Regulation And Corporate Responsibility, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What I want to do is talk about the big picture, as John suggested, and consider the likely spillover effects of Sarbanes-Oxley. I want to do this in a discretely administrative law-oriented way, taking two themes that were very visible and driving forces behind the legislation. The first, as Mary suggested in her opening remarks, is a question about federalism. It has been common for the last twenty years, at least, to trot out - as John just did - a distinction between federal and state spheres of competency. The SEC is on the disclosure side, while the substance of …


Deconstructing Section 11: Public Offering Liability In A Continuous Disclosure Environment, Donald C. Langevoort Jan 2000

Deconstructing Section 11: Public Offering Liability In A Continuous Disclosure Environment, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article is an effort to rethink civil liability in capital-raising transactions by large capitalization issuers. After a brief digression about who should set liability standards, the article then addresses two related questions. The first deals with a natural question: Should not the primary regulatory effort for large issuers be to assure continuous disclosure in the secondary marketplace, given the far larger volume of such trading in that market compared to that in primary transactions? Second, if we have developed a satisfactory regime of disclosure responsibilities for this setting, what more, if anything, in terms of liability protection, is needed …