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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Securities Law
Working Hard Or Making Work? Plaintiffs' Attorneys Fees In Securities Fraud Class Actions, Stephen J. Choi, Jessica Erickson, A. C. Pritchard
Working Hard Or Making Work? Plaintiffs' Attorneys Fees In Securities Fraud Class Actions, Stephen J. Choi, Jessica Erickson, A. C. Pritchard
Articles
In this article, we study attorney fees awarded in the largest securities class actions: “mega- settlements.” Consistent with prior work, we find larger fee awards but lower percentages in these cases. We also find that courts are more likely to reject or modify fee requests made in connection with the largest settlements. We conjecture that this scrutiny provides an incentive for law firms to bill more hours, not to advance the case, but to help justify large fee awards—“make work.” The results of our empirical tests are consistent with plaintiffs’ attorneys investing more time in litigation against larger companies, with …
Private Company Lies, Elizabeth Pollman
Private Company Lies, Elizabeth Pollman
All Faculty Scholarship
Rule 10b-5’s antifraud catch-all is one of the most consequential pieces of American administrative law and most highly developed areas of judicially-created federal law. Although the rule broadly prohibits securities fraud in both public and private company stock, the vast majority of jurisprudence, and the voluminous academic literature that accompanies it, has developed through a public company lens.
This Article illuminates how the explosive growth of private markets has left huge portions of U.S. capital markets with relatively light securities fraud scrutiny and enforcement. Some of the largest private companies by valuation grow in an environment of extreme information asymmetry …
Constructive Ambiguity And Judicial Development Of Insider Trading, Jill E. Fisch
Constructive Ambiguity And Judicial Development Of Insider Trading, Jill E. Fisch
All Faculty Scholarship
The Texas Gulf Sulphur decision began what has become a fifty-year project of developing U.S. insider trading regulation through judicial lawmaking. During the course of that project, the courts developed a complex, fraud-based approach to determining the scope of liability. The approach has led, in many cases, to doctrinal uncertainty, a result that is reflected in the recent decisions in Newman, Salman, and Martoma.
n the face of this uncertainty, many commentators have called for a legislative solution. This article argues, however, that the true challenge of insider trading regulation is a lack of consensus about the …
Janus Capital Group, Inc. V. First Derivative Traders: The Culmination Of The Supreme Court’S Evolution From Liberal To Reactionary In Rule 10b-5 Actions, Charles W. Murdock
Janus Capital Group, Inc. V. First Derivative Traders: The Culmination Of The Supreme Court’S Evolution From Liberal To Reactionary In Rule 10b-5 Actions, Charles W. Murdock
Charles W. Murdock
“Political” decisions such as Citizens United and National Federation of Independent Business (“Obamacare”) reflect the reactionary bent of several Supreme Court justices. But this reactionary trend is discernible in other areas as well. With regard to Rule 10b-5, the Court has handed down a series of decisions that could be grouped into four trilogies. The article examines the trend over the past 40 years which has become increasingly conservative and finally reactionary.
The first trilogy was a liberal one, arguably overextending the scope of Rule 10b-5. This was followed by a conservative trilogy which put a brake on such extension, …
Lies Without Liars? Janus Capital And Conservative Securities Jurisprudence, Donald C. Langevoort
Lies Without Liars? Janus Capital And Conservative Securities Jurisprudence, Donald C. Langevoort
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The Supreme Court’s recent Janus Capital case offers a reading of the word “make” in Rule 10b-5 that speaks to ultimate legal authority over the communication in question. This creates the real possibility that we can have lies without liars, an entirely perplexing result in terms of any purposive meaning of the rule. In so holding, Justice Thomas joined a seemingly short list of judges who suggest that legal formalism is a particularly good weapon with which to fight securities fraud. This paper exploresJanus through the lens of conservative textualism, which takes us through a much longer intellectual history …
Determining The Proper Pleading Standard Under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act Of 1995 After In Re Silicon Graphics , Erin Brady
Pepperdine Law Review
No abstract provided.
The Road Not Taken: Rethinking Securities Regulation And The Case For Federal Merit Review, Daniel J. Morrissey
The Road Not Taken: Rethinking Securities Regulation And The Case For Federal Merit Review, Daniel J. Morrissey
University of Richmond Law Review
No abstract provided.
Getting The Word Out About Fraud: A Theoretical Analysis Of Whistleblowing And Insider Trading, Jonathan Macey
Getting The Word Out About Fraud: A Theoretical Analysis Of Whistleblowing And Insider Trading, Jonathan Macey
Michigan Law Review
The purpose of this Article is to show that corporate whistleblowing is not analytically or functionally distinguishable from insider trading when such trading is based on "whistleblower information," that is, the information a whistleblower might disclose to the authorities. In certain contexts, both insider trading and whistleblowing, if incentivized, would reduce the incidence of corporate pathologies such as fraud and corruption. In light of this analysis, it is peculiar that whistleblowing is encouraged and protected, while insider trading on whistleblower information is not only discouraged but criminalized. Often, insider trading will be far more effective than whistleblowing at bringing fraud …
A Business Ethics Perspective On Sarbanes-Oxley And The Organizational Sentencing Guidelines, David Hess
A Business Ethics Perspective On Sarbanes-Oxley And The Organizational Sentencing Guidelines, David Hess
Michigan Law Review
This Article assesses the ability of Sarbanes-Oxley and other recent changes in the law and stock exchange listing requirements to reduce the incidence of fraud and to increase the reporting of financial misconduct. It begins by examining the individual decision-makers within a corporation and analyzing their intentions and behaviors under the Theory of Planned Behavior. It then examines the ability of the organization to influence the employees' intentions and behaviors through codes of ethics and compliance programs, and finds growing support for the usefulness of integrity based compliance programs. Finally, the Article considers how the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and Organizational Sentencing …
Reassessing Damages In Securities Fraud Class Actions, Elizabeth C. Burch
Reassessing Damages In Securities Fraud Class Actions, Elizabeth C. Burch
ExpressO
No coherent doctrinal statement exists for calculating open-market damages for securities fraud class actions. Instead, courts have tried in vain to fashion common-law deceit and misrepresentation remedies to fit open-market fraud. The result is a relatively ineffective system with a hallmark feature: unpredictable damage awards. This poses a significant fraud deterrence problem from both a practical and a theoretical standpoint.
In 2005, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to clarify open-market damage principles and to facilitate earlier dismissal of cases without compensable economic losses. Instead, in Dura Pharmaceuticals v. Broudo, it further confused the damage issue by (1) perpetuating the …
The Next Epidemic: Bubbles And The Growth And Decay Of Securities Regulation, Erik F. Gerding
The Next Epidemic: Bubbles And The Growth And Decay Of Securities Regulation, Erik F. Gerding
Publications
This article explores how speculative bubbles undermine the effectiveness of securities regulations and spawn epidemics of securities fraud. A brief historical survey demonstrates that stock market bubbles almost invariably coincide with epidemics of securities fraud, and provides a compelling argument that the outbreak of fraud in the Enron era did not stem merely from factors unique to the 1990s, but from the dynamics of an asset price bubble as well.
Drawing on perspectives from securities law practice and economic theory, the article argues that bubbles dilute the deterrent effect of antifraud rules and promote deregulation. Both effects alter the calculus …
Securities Market And Securities Regulations In China, Fengxia Dai
Securities Market And Securities Regulations In China, Fengxia Dai
LLM Theses and Essays
China is a large developing country with a socialist ideology that is currently undergoing a period of reform and transformation. In December 1990, China opened its first national securities market - the Shanghai Securities Exchange. This was soon followed in November 1991 by the first special shares denominated in foreign currencies and sold only to overseas investors. These important steps in the development of China’s securities industry indicate commitment by Chinese authorities to the two key components of the nation’s economic reform program - economic systemic reform, and opening to the outside world. China’s securities market and securities regulations contain …
Thinking To Be Paid Versus Being Paid To Think, Merritt B. Fox
Thinking To Be Paid Versus Being Paid To Think, Merritt B. Fox
Faculty Scholarship
In the first chapter of The Economic Structure of Corporate Law, Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel make an arresting statement:
... [P]eople who are backing their beliefs with cash are correct; they have every reason to avoid mistakes, while critics (be they academics or regulators) are rewarded for novel rather than accurate beliefs. Market professionals who estimate these things wrongly suffer directly; academics and regulators who estimate wrongly do not pay a similar penalty. Persons who wager with their own money may be wrong, but they are less likely to be wrong than are academics and regulators, who are wagering …