Securities Law Commons^™

The Fragmented Regulation Of Investment Advice: A Call For Harmonization, Christine Lazaro, Benjamin P. Edwards

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Decades of short-term thinking and regulatory fixes created the bewilderingly complex statutory and regulatory structures governing the giving of personalized investment advice to retail customers. Although deeply flawed, the current systems remain entrenched because of the difficulties inherent in making radical alterations. Importantly, the current patchwork systems do not seem to serve retail customers particularly well. Retail customers tend to make predictable and costly mistakes in allocating their assets. Some of this occurs because many investors lack basic financial literacy. A recent study released by the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “Commission”) on financial literacy among investors …

Safe At Any Speed: Robert Ahdieh’S Take On Cost-Benefit Analysis In Financial Markets, Jack M. Beermann

Shorter Faculty Works

When I saw the title of Robert Ahdieh’s recent article, Reanalyzing Cost-Benefit Analysis: Toward a Framework of Function(s) and Form(s), I thought, “oh no, not another article about CBA.” Knowing Professor Adhieh’s work, I took a flyer and read it anyway, and boy was I happy with my decision. This is a great article which should be of interest to anyone involved in administrative law, securities regulation and policy analysis more generally. Cost-benefit analysis has become an important regulatory tool, and Professor Adhieh’s article makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the special analysis required under Section 106 …

The Jobs Act: Encouraging Capital Formation But Not Ipos, Jesse Scott

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

This note will analyze several of the key provisions of the JOBS Act and their effect on raising capital for small growth companies. The scope of this note will exclude the Title III crowdfunding provisions, as there is already substantial discussion about the topic in the legal and business communities. Part II discusses the IPO registration process. Part III explores the JOBS Act and its effect on securities regulation. Specifically, this note will cover the Title I IPO on-ramp, the Title II changes to Regulation D, the Title IV changes to Regulation A and 144A, and finally the Title V …

A Blended Approach To Reducing The Costs Of Shareholder Litigation, Valian A. Afshar

Michigan Law Review

Multiforum litigation and federal securities law class actions impose heavy costs on corporations and their shareholders without producing proportionate benefits. Both are largely the result of the agency problem between shareholders and their attorneys, driven more by the attorneys’ interests in generating fees than by the interests of their clients. In response to each of these problems, commentators have recommended a number of solutions. Chief among them are forum selection and mandatory arbitration provisions in a corporation’s charter or bylaws. This Note recommends that corporations unilaterally adopt both forum selection and mandatory arbitration bylaws to address shareholder lawsuits under state …

Downstream Securities Regulation, Anita Krug

All Faculty Scholarship

Securities regulation wears two hats. Its “upstream” side governs firms in connection with their obtaining financing in the securities markets. That is, it regulates firms’ and issuers’ offers and sales of securities, whether in public offerings to retail investors or in private offerings to institutional investors. Its “downstream” side, by contrast, governs financial services providers, who assist with investors’ activities in those markets. Their services include providing advice regarding securities investments, as investment advisers do; aggregating investors’ assets for purposes of enabling those investors to invest their assets collectively, as mutual funds do; and acting as “middlemen” between buyers and …

Mad Money: Rethinking Private Placements, Abraham J.B. Cable

Washington and Lee Law Review

Currently, regulations try to limit unregistered sales of stock (private placements) to the “smart money,” either by informing investors through disclosure or excluding unsophisticated investors from the market. In theory, these smart-money approaches promote the dual goals of capital formation and investor protection. But in practice, regulators have struggled to craft effective disclosure or screening mechanisms. In light of these failures, this Article advocates for a new approach—investment caps that allow every investor a limited amount of “mad money” to invest in risky private placements. This mad-money approach can protect investors by encouraging basic diversification and liquidity, while advancing capital …

Enforcement Of The Duties Of Directors By The Securities And Futures Investors Protection Center In Taiwan, Christopher Chao-Hung Chen

Christopher Chao-hung CHEN

The purpose of this article is to examine the role of the Securities and Futures Investors Protection Center (SFIPC) in Taiwan in enforcing the duties of directors. To help shareholders or investors pursue a director for breach of company law or securities regulations, Taiwan created the SFIPC, a charity sanctioned by statutes, to bring class action or direct legal action on behalf of minority shareholders or individual investors. By conducting an empirical survey of judgments from lawsuits involving the SFIPC since its creation, we found that the SFIPC is generally very active in enforcing securities regulations but far less active …

E-Commerce And Electronic Payment System Risks: Lessons From Paypal, Lawrence J. Trautman

Lawrence J. Trautman Sr.

What are the major risks perceived by those engaged in e-commerce and electronic payment systems? What development risks, if they become reality, may cause substantial increases in operating costs or threaten the very survival of the enterprise? This article utilizes the relevant annual report disclosures from eBay (parent of PayPal), along with other eBay and PayPal documents, as a potentially powerful teaching device. Most of the descriptive language to follow is excerpted directly from eBay’s regulatory filings. My additions include weaving these materials into a logical presentation and providing supplemental sources for those who desire a deeper look (usually in …

Enforcement Of The Duties Of Directors By The Securities And Futures Investors Protection Center In Taiwan, Christopher C. H. Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The purpose of this article is to examine the role of the Securities and Futures Investors Protection Center (SFIPC) in Taiwan in enforcing the duties of directors. To help shareholders or investors pursue a director for breach of company law or securities regulations, Taiwan created the SFIPC, a charity sanctioned by statutes, to bring class action or direct legal action on behalf of minority shareholders or individual investors. By conducting an empirical survey of judgments from lawsuits involving the SFIPC since its creation, we found that the SFIPC is generally very active in enforcing securities regulations but far less active …

Bounties For Bad Behavior: Rewarding Culpable Whistleblowers Under The Dodd-Frank Act And Internal Revenue Code, Jennifer M. Pacella

Jennifer M. Pacella, Esq.

In 2012, Bradley Birkenfeld received a $104 million reward or “bounty” from the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) for blowing the whistle on his employer, UBS, which facilitated a major offshore tax fraud scheme by assisting thousands of U.S. taxpayers to hide their assets in Switzerland. Birkenfeld does not fit the mold of the public’s common perception of a whistleblower. He was himself complicit in this crime and even served time in prison for his involvement. Despite his conviction, Birkenfeld was still eligible for a sizable whistleblower bounty under the IRS Whistleblower Program, which allows rewards for whistleblowers who are convicted …

The Worst Test Of Truth: The "Marketplace Of Ideas" As Faulty Metaphor, Thomas W. Joo

Thomas W Joo

In his famous dissent in Abrams v. United States, Justice Holmes proclaimed that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” This Article critiques the basic argument against speech regulation that has developed from the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor: that speech should be “free” because markets are “free,” and because free markets produce “truth.” These assertions about markets are taken for granted, but they portray markets and market regulation inaccurately; thus economic markets provide a poor analogy for the deregulation of speech.

First Amendment jurisprudence invokes the …

Securities Regulation Of Alternative Litigation Finance, Wendy Gerwick Couture

Articles

No abstract provided.

Greed, Envy, And The Criminalization Of Insider Trading, John P. Anderson

Journal Articles

In October 2011, a U.S. district court sentenced Raj Rajaratnam to eleven years in federal prison for insider trading. This is the longest sentence for insider trading in U.S. history, but it is significantly less than the nineteen to twenty-four-year term requested by the government. Such harsh prison terms (equal in some cases to those meted out for murder or rape) require sound justification in a liberal society. Yet jurists, politicians, and scholars have failed to offer a clear articulation of either the economic harm or the moral wrong committed by the insider trader. This Article looks to fill this …

A Canadian Model Of Corporate Governance: Where Do Shareholders Really Stand?, Carol Liao

All Faculty Publications

This feature article in the Director Journal summarizes the findings from the report, "A Canadian Model of Corporate Governance: Insights from Canada's Leading Legal Practitioners," produced for the Canadian Foundation for Governance Research and the Institute of Corporate Directors (also available on SSRN).

In the report, interviews were conducted with 32 leading senior legal practitioners across Canada to opine on the fundamental principles that are driving the development of Canadian corporate governance. The report found that Canadian common law has made the process of considering stakeholders in the "best interests of the corporation" more overt, well beyond what is assumed …

'Quack Corporate Governance' As Traditional Chinese Medicine – The Securities Regulation Cannibalization Of China's Corporate Law And A State Regulator's Battle Against Party State Political Economic Power, Nicholas C. Howson

Articles

From the start of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) “corporatization ” project in the late 1980s, a Chinese corporate governance regime subject to increasingly enabling legal norms has been determined by mandatory regulations imposed by the PRC securities regulator, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). Indeed, the Chinese corporate law system has been cannibalized by all - encompassing securities regulation directed at corporate governance, at least for companies with listed stock. This Article traces the path of that sustained intervention and makes a case — wholly contrary to the “quack corporate governance” critique much aired in the United States …

A Return To Old-Time Religion? The Glass-Steagall Act, The Volcker Rule, Limits On Proprietary Trading, And Sustainability, Douglas M. Branson

Articles

Pursuant to directions contained in the Dodd-Frank Act (2010), five federal agencies collaborated to produce a 983 page rule limiting proprietary trading by financial institutions (the Volcker Rule, which becomes effective in summer, 2015). The Volcker Rule limits proprietary trading to no more than 3 percent of “Tier One” assets. The hoped for effects are that financial institutions will be strictly limited in trading for their own accounts. Some say, propelled by unbridled greed, U.S. financial institutions borrowed excessive amounts of money, inflating leverage ratios as high as 36 or 40 to 1, using the borrowed funds to engage in …

Global Regulatory And Ethical Framework, Henry Ordower

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reviews statutory and court sanctioned private regulatory frameworks affecting the creation of private equity (PE) funds and their primary activity of acquiring corporate enterprises. The chapter reviews U.S. legislation regulating securities, investment companies, and tender offers, state antitakeover legislation, state court decisions on hostile corporate takeovers and “poison pill” defenses, as well as European Union directives on takeovers and alternative investment fund managers. It concludes that regulation in the United States has shifted the balance of power in corporate acquisitions to incumbent management. The chapter also examines the diametrically opposed ethical views of PE funds as investment entities …

A Canadian Model Of Corporate Governance, Carol Liao

All Faculty Publications

What is Canada’s actual legal model to govern its corporations? Recent landmark judicial decisions indicate Canada is shifting away from an Anglo-American definition of shareholder primacy. Yet the Canadian securities commissions have become increasingly influential in the governance sphere, and by nature are shareholder-focused. Shareholders’ rights have increased well beyond what was ever contemplated by Canadian corporate laws, and the issue of greater shareholder vs. board control has now become the topic of live debate. The future of Canada's overall model seems to rest on what will be more compelling: the constancy of the corporate statutes and trajectory of the …