Law Commons^™

The Unreasonableness Of Reasonable: Rethinking The Reasonable Investor Standard, Alexandra Li

Northwestern University Law Review

This Note explores the “reasonable investor” standard in light of recent developments in pandemic-era securities litigation. Scholars have long criticized the reasonable investor standard for determining materiality. Given the dramatic backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the limitations of the standard are becoming ever more evident. This Note provides a brief history of the development of the current standard and highlights some of its problems through two recent COVID-19 securities fraud cases. This Note argues that the reasonable investor standard is no longer sufficient to protect investors. Through examining tort law and First Amendment jurisprudence, this Note differentiates between the “reasonable” …

Private Equity And Venture Capital In Germany: How Europe’S Heartland Is Poised To Become The Next Bay Area, Jake Besanceney

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Abstract

This note examines the current state of private equity and venture capital activity and investment in Germany, and specifically in Berlin, in relation to the state of such activity and investment that existed in the San Francisco Bay Area prior to and following its tech explosion in the late twentieth century. Numerous factors such as political and ethnic diversity, a comparatively lower cost of living, and proximity to higher education institutes are propelling Berlin’s startup and tech scenes, and are eerily reminiscent of similar factors that fueled the Bay Area’s growth and attracted private equity and venture capital activity …

Self-Regulation In The Derivatives Markets: Stability Through Collaboration, Heath P. Tarbert

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Sound financial regulation does not require choosing between governmental and private action. Instead, optimal regulatory solutions often blend the expertise and adaptability of private-sector influence with the stabilizing effects of federal oversight. This collaborative framework has a rich history in U.S. derivatives regulation, which has long relied on self-regulatory organizations (“SROs”) like exchanges, clearinghouses, and the National Futures Association to help promote market stability and customer protection. SROs remain subject to oversight by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”), which guards against the proverbial fox-in-the-henhouse scenario while advancing quintessential government functions like mitigating systemic risk.

The advantages of this self-regulatory …

Comparative Analysis Of U.S. And Saudi Arabia Investment Funds Regulations, Gabriella Tang

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

The investment funds sector has always been a major player in the financial industry globally. As such, many countries with mature financial markets have enacted regulations to govern the activity and management of investment funds. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enacted the Investment Company Act of 1940(the Act) as an effort to restore investor confidence in investment funds and safeguard investors from future abuses after the market crash in 1929. On the other hand, emerging financial markets started to take part in regulations in the hope to attract more investors and outside resources. The Capital Market Authority of …

The Indian Securities Fraud Class Action: Is Class Arbitration The Answer?, Brian T. Fitzpatrick, Randall S. Thomas

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Abstract:

In 2013, India enacted one of the most robust private enforcement regimes for securities fraud violations in the world. Unlike in most other countries, Indian shareholders can now initiate securities fraud lawsuits on their own, represent all other defrauded shareholders unless those shareholders affirmatively opt out, and collect money damages for the entire class. The only thing missing is a better financing mechanism: unlike the United States, Canada, and Australia, India does not permit contingency fees, so class action lawyers cannot front the costs of litigation in exchange for collecting a percentage of what they recover. On the other …

Crowding Out Theory: Protecting Shareholders By Balancing Executives’ Incentives In France, The United States, & China, Palden Flynn

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

This paper explores the differences between executive compensation regimes in France, the United States, and China. It asks whether there is a link between state regulation of real options as a form of executive compensation and state regulation of shareholder protections. This paper argues that if a country regulates the use of real options as compensation, then that country is also more likely to have strong shareholder protection laws. This argument seems to be true based on a descriptive review of executive compensation law and shareholder protections in France, the United States, and China.

If it is true that countries …

Regulating High-Frequency Trading: The Case For Individual Criminal Liability, Orlando Cosme Jr.

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The popular imagination of securities trading is a chaotic, physical stock exchange—a busy floor with hurried traders yelling, “buy, buy, buy!” While this image is a Hollywood and media favorite, it is no longer accurate. In 2019, most securities trading is conducted electronically on digital markets. One type of trading strategy, high-frequency trading, utilizes algorithms, data centers, fiber optic cables, and supercomputers to obtain an edge in the market. High-frequency trading has leveraged advancements in technology to constitute over half of all trading volume in a given day. High-frequency trading, however, has come under scrutiny in recent years as it …

Insider Tainting: Strategic Tipping Of Material Nonpublic Information, Andrew Verstein

Northwestern University Law Review

Insider trading law is meant to be a shield, protecting the market and investors from unscrupulous traders, but it can also be a sword. Insofar as we penalize trading on the basis of material, nonpublic information, it becomes possible to share information strategically in order to disable or constrain innocent investors. A hostile takeover can be averted, or a bidding war curtailed, because recipients of such information must then refrain from trading. This Article offers the first general account of “insider tainting,” an increasingly pervasive phenomenon of weaponizing insider trading law.

Commitment And Entrenchment In Corporate Governance, K.J. Martijn Cremers, Saura Masconale, Simone M. Sepe

Northwestern University Law Review

Over the past twenty years, a growing number of empirical studies have provided evidence that governance arrangements protecting incumbents from removal promote managerial entrenchment, reducing firm value. As a result of these studies, “good” corporate governance is widely understood today as being about stronger shareholder rights.

This Article rebuts this view, presenting new empirical evidence that challenges the results of prior studies and developing a novel theoretical account of what really matters in corporate governance. Employing a unique dataset that spans from 1978 to 2008, we document that protective arrangements that require shareholder approval—such as staggered boards and supermajority requirements …

An Fda For Financial Innovation: Applying The Insurable Interest Doctrine To Twenty-First-Century Financial Markets, Eric A. Posner, E. Glen Weyl

Northwestern University Law Review

The financial crisis of 2008 was caused in part by speculative investment in complex derivatives. In enacting the Dodd–Frank Act, Congress sought to address the problem of speculative investment, but it merely transferred that authority to various agencies, which have not yet found a solution. We propose that when firms invent new financial products, they be forbidden to sell them until they receive approval from a government agency designed along the lines of the FDA, which screens pharmaceutical innovations. The agency would approve financial products if they satisfy a test for social utility that focuses on whether the product will …

Jury Certification Of Federal Securities Fraud Class Actions, Thomas Kayes

Northwestern University Law Review

The rough equivalence of certification and ultimate outcome is class action dogma. If certification is granted, then the plaintiff “wins” by settlement because the risk of incurring class-wide liability by going to trial is too great. If certification is denied, the defendant “wins” because the case may not be worth litigating without the possibility of a class-wide recovery. This Note is about where the dogma is wrong. There are now cases where a denial of certification, just like a grant, presents to the defendant the risk of incurring class-wide liability at trial. This is because those cases are capable of …

Congressional Arbitrage At The Executive's Expense: The Speech Or Debate Clause And The Unenforceable Stock Act, Anna Fodor

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Better Bounty Hunting: How The Sec's New Whistleblower Program Changes The Securities Fraud Class Action Debate, Amanda M. Rose

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is Canada The New Shangri-La Of Global Securities Class Actions?, Tanya J. Monestier

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

There has been significant academic buzz about Silver v. Imax, an Ontario case certifying a global class of shareholders alleging statutory and common law misrepresentation in connection with a secondary market distribution of shares. Although global class actions on a more limited scale have been certified in Canada prior to Imax, it can now be said that global classes have “officially” arrived in Canada. Many predict that the Imax decision means that Ontario will become the new center for the resolution of global securities disputes. This is particularly so after the United States largely relinquished this role in Morrison v. …

A Bright Idea: A Bright-Line Test For Extraterritoriality In F-Cubed Securities Fraud Private Causes Of Action, Jennifer Mitchell Coupland

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Whether a foreign or American claimant has a private right of action in so-called ―Foreign-Cubed‖ or ―Foreign-Squared‖ claims under Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (Exchange Act) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Rule 10b-5 has been the subject of much debate among U.S. courts, Congress, and the international community. Historically, these cases have been heard in the United States if the conduct had a substantial effect in the United States or on U.S. citizens (the effects test), or if the fraudulent or wrongful conduct occurred in the United States (the conduct test). However, in June 2010, …

Addressing Inept Sec Enforcement Efforts: Lessons From Madoff, The Hedge Fund Industry, And Title Iv Of The Dodd-Frank Act For U.S. And Global Financial Systems, Cheryl Nichols

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

A global regulatory framework for hedge fund custodians is needed, in addition to Title IV of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd-Frank Act or Dodd-Frank), to reduce the risk of the occurrence of another Madoff fraud and to assess systemic risk posed by hedge fund activities in the global financial system. This article recommends the creation of a single global regulator for independent, qualified hedge fund custodians to which country regulators must submit sufficient information to protect investors and to assess the level of systemic risk posed by hedge fund activities in the global …

The Derivative Market’S Black Sheep: Regulation Of Non-Cleared Security-Based Swaps Under Dodd-Frank, Barry Le Vine

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

This paper seeks to comprehensively analyze the SEC's security-based swaps mandate and how it should regulate those non-cleared OTC derivatives within its regulatory ambit to promote market stability, protect counterparties, and reduce the incentives for cross-border regulatory arbitrage which leads to systemic risk creation. It argues that there are many legitimate and compelling reasons for entering into bespoke security-based swap transactions and that imposing collateral and margin requirements would only distort the economics of these trades. It further argues that the SEC should not be in the business of setting margin requirements, which would be an unprecedented move for the …

Short Selling In A Financial Crisis: The Regulation Of Short Sales In The United Kingdom And The United States, Katherine Mcgavin

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

In a well-regulated market with minimal risk of abuse, the liquidity and information efficiency benefits of short selling far outweigh its potential harm. Contrary to the recent hostility short sellers face from market regulators and the popular press, short sellers in aggregate are neither market villains nor agents of destruction. While a small minority of short sellers have exploited lax regulation and inattentive enforcement of anti-abuse rules to manipulate stock prices and earn substantial fees, these rare episodes suggest that the world's major capital markets need better enforcement of existing rules and not new rules per se. The failure of …

Lowering The Cost Of Rent: How Ifrs And The Convergence Of Corporate Governance Standards Can Help Foreign Issuers Raise Capital In The United States And Abroad, Kyle W. Pine

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Since the early 1990s the United States has experienced a dramatic growth in the number of foreign firms choosing to trade their shares in U.S. markets. Meanwhile, Europe and other markets have not experienced this effect to the same extent. there has been an observable worldwide growth in stock market capitalization since the 1990s with an increasing number of foreign issuers choosing to cross-list their shares abroad, usually in the United States. Traditional explanations for why firms choose to cross-list have focused primarily on access to trade in more liquid markets. A more convincing theory for why firms cross-list, attributed …

A Forensic Study Of Daewoo's Corporate Governance: Does Responsibility For The Meltdown Solely Lie With The Chaebol And Korea?, Joongi Kim

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

At the end of 1999, one of the largest conglomerates in the world, the Daewoo Group, collapsed in a spectacular fashion. During its peak, Daewoo was a sprawling enterprise with over 320,000 employees with 590 subsidiaries overseas that operated in over 110 countries. Its management received widespread praise and academic recognition for its success. Yet, when the Asian financial crisis hit in 1997, it managed to commit a deception worth 22.9 trillion won ($15.3 billion) that was termed the "biggest accounting fraud in history, surpassing WorldCom and Enron . . . ." Years later, inner-workings of the conglomerate are finally …

Beyond Enron: Regulation In Energy Derivatives Trading, Alexia Brunet, Meredith Shafe

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

The bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation in December 2002 is the biggest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history. The Houston-based company, formed in 1985, became the nation's seventh-largest company in revenue by buying electricity from generators and selling it to consumers. Because Enron made the market in energy trading, its collapse fundamentally altered the U.S. energy trading industry. Equally important, the disclosure of Enron's role in California's power market crisis shattered confidence in deregulated wholesale-electricity and natural gas markets, creating obstacles for new players seeking to restore confidence in energy trading markets. New market entrants offer their clients a more complete …

The Equivalence Approach To Securities Regulation, Tzung-Bor Wei

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

It is undisputed that the world's financial markets are becoming increasingly international and increasingly integrated. "How should regulators respond?" is a hotly contested issue. Academic literature debates two competing approaches to international securities regulation--"harmonization" and "regulatory competition." Harmonization is the idea that rules and regulations should be standardized across countries as much as possible. Countries may achieve harmonization by ceding lawmaking authority to an international body or agency; alternatively, countries may agree to enact similar rules through their normal, domestic rule-promulgating procedures. In contrast to the harmonization approach stands the regulatory competition approach. Under this model, countries do not coordinate …

Ec Reforms Of Corporate Governance And Capital Markets Law: Do They Tackle Insiders' Opportunism?, Luca Enriques, Matteo Gatti

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Company and capital markets laws are rapidly evolving everywhere: there are few countries around the world where they have not been the subject of reform or where at least a reform agenda has not been devised. There are various reasons for this, both global and local. Among the global (or common) reasons for reform, two at least deserve to be singled out: large-scale market crises or prominent economic scandals, and financial development.

Shock Therapy' For Aktiengesellschaften: Can The Sarbanes-Oxley Certification Requirements Transform German Corporate Culture, Practice And Prospects?, Hudson T. Hollister

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Act) of 20021 was the U.S. Congress's hasty response to the wave of corporate scandals that had begun to devastate U.S. investor confidence during the previous year. Its sixty-six pages contain a wide range of measures designed to enhance the quality and independence of corporate audits and disclosure under the U.S. securities-regulation regime. The Act applies to public corporations-corporations that are required to file regular financial reports under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (Exchange Act). Objections from German corporations and observers were particularly vigorous. At least one German foreign private issuer registered with the SEC has …

A Securities Regulator Looks At Onvergence, Donald T. Nicolaisen

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

For many years there has been a dedicated group of practitioners, standard setters, business leaders and others from around the world who have worked to establish a single set of globally accepted accounting standards for the benefit of the capital markets. These people clearly had their hearts in the right place but, absent a binding mandate to apply the standards, it seemed largely a labor of love. Now I expect those pioneering initiatives and the many years of effort to pay off because in 2005 a large number of companies are joining what up to now has been a limited …

Cross-Border Securitized Transactions: The Missing Link In Establishing A Viable Chinese Securitization Market, Nicholas J. Faleris

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

This article proposes that asset-backed securitization in China could be jump-started by first focusing on cross-border (sometimes called transnational) securitization, and by establishing a dependable group of regional investors. Cross-border securitization transactions would enable China to experiment with various packaging of state-owned securities on a trial basis through a transaction-by-transaction process. Thus far, the focus has been specifically on reforming the legal infrastructure so that China eventually would be able to attract investors and capitalize on an emerging market. Rather than attempting to both build an infrastructure and attract asset-backed securitization investors with large, sweeping changes, the market would be …

Multinational Regulatory Competition And Single-Stock Futures , Frank Partnoy

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Whereas these first two forms of regulatory competition are well documented and covered in the legal literature, the third form - which I call "multinational regulatory competition" - is newer and more difficult to characterize. Accordingly, any claims about future regulatory competition in this form necessarily are speculative. By "multinational regulatory competition," I mean competition occurring when a group of regulators from more than one sovereign forms a partnership as a multinational regulator and then seeks to compete with other groups of regulators, also formed from more than one sovereign. There is some recent empirical evidence that regulatory trends in …

Demutualization Of Financial Exchanges: Business As Usual, Caroline Bradley

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

The article begins by outlining some of the history of mutual business forms, and the recent demutualization movement. Then, after examining the idea of exchanges as proprietary businesses, the article examines three new problems caused by demutualization: how shares in an exchange will be traded; how a proprietary exchange can function as a regulator; and the risk that a proprietary exchange will become a take-over target. The article concludes that there is no perfect arrangement for trading in an exchange's shares; that, if proprietary exchanges are allowed to act as regulators, they should be subject to some constraints as to …

Securities Price Risks And Financial Derivative Markets , Peter H. Huang

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

The financial and popular media report almost daily on the volatility of securities market prices. Yet, many people continue to buy securities to hedge against or speculate on certain risks. People can also buy or sell derivatives to hedge against or speculate on fluctuations in securities prices. This Article discusses three regulatory policy implications of utilizing derivatives markets to reallocate the bearing of securities price risks. First, if there are too few non-redundant derivative markets, a competitive market equilibrium allocation of securities price risks is typically constrained Pareto inefficient. This financial economic result means that for typical economies, a regulator …

International Regulatory Responses To Derivative Crises: The Role Of The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission , Brooksley Born

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Over the past decade, as derivatives markets - and particularly the over-the-counter ("OTC") market - have become increasingly global in nature, the U.S.. Commodity Futures Trading Commission ("CFTC") - the federal regulatory agency that oversees futures and commodity option trading' - has played an active role in fostering international regulatory cooperation. The technology of the information age, allowing instant communication and electronic trading, has revolutionized financial markets, instituting around-the-clock, around-the-globe trading, globally active market users and market intermediaries, and an increasing pace of market innovation. Market crises now have the potential for widespread financial impact and require international regulatory response. …