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Introduction: The Federal Securities Code -- Its Purpose, Plan, And Progress, Louis Loss

Vanderbilt Law Review

The first generation of federal securities statutes, vintage 1933-40, has sprouted tentacles in so many areas of the American corpus juris that it is not easy to think of any field in which so much law-and lore-have been built on so flimsy a statutory base. The nineteen-page grandfather statute, the Securities Act of 1933, goes on, with a continually enhanced fertility that belies its years, to yield esoterica like the "140 series" of rules: professed "safe harbors" whose entrances are guarded by Cerberus atop Scylla and a bevy of Sirens cavorting in Charybdis. In the area of "fraud" that peripatetic …