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Articles 1 - 19 of 19

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Future Of The Securities And Exchange Commission As A Market Regulator, Roberta S. Karmel Jan 2009

The Future Of The Securities And Exchange Commission As A Market Regulator, Roberta S. Karmel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The Future Of The Securities And Exchange Commission As A Market Regulator, Roberta S. Karmel Jan 2009

The Future Of The Securities And Exchange Commission As A Market Regulator, Roberta S. Karmel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The Hardening Of Soft Law In Securities Regulation, Roberta S. Karmel, Claire Kelly Jan 2009

The Hardening Of Soft Law In Securities Regulation, Roberta S. Karmel, Claire Kelly

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Redesigning The Sec: Does The Treasury Have A Better Idea?, John C. Coffee Jr., Hillary A. Sale Jan 2009

Redesigning The Sec: Does The Treasury Have A Better Idea?, John C. Coffee Jr., Hillary A. Sale

Faculty Scholarship

Symposiums supply a snapshot in time. By observing the common assumptions and shared frameworks of a collection of scholars writing contemporaneously, one gains both insight into the intellectual world of a past era and the ability to measure its distance from our own. Twenty-five years ago the Virginia Law Review organized a noted symposium (the "1984 Symposium") to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the SEC. A number of prominent scholars participated, and its articles have been much cited.


Keynote Address: Understanding The ‘Subprime’ Financial Crisis, Steven L. Schwarcz Jan 2009

Keynote Address: Understanding The ‘Subprime’ Financial Crisis, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Keynote Address: The Case For A Market Liquidity Provider Of Last Resort, Steven L. Schwarcz Jan 2009

Keynote Address: The Case For A Market Liquidity Provider Of Last Resort, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This short paper, prepared as a keynote address, explains why the credit crunch is fundamentally a story about financial markets, not banks. Its cause was a collapse of securitization and other debt markets, which have become major sources of financing for consumers and companies. Deprived of this financing, consumers have had difficulty purchasing homes and automobiles, and companies have had difficulty purchasing inventory and making capital investments, causing the real economy to shrink. This paper examines how these financial markets should be protected. Although already subject to many prescriptive regulatory protections, these markets evolve faster than regulation can adapt. The …


Leverage In The Board Room: The Unsung Influence Of Private Lenders In Corporate Governance, Frederick Tung Jan 2009

Leverage In The Board Room: The Unsung Influence Of Private Lenders In Corporate Governance, Frederick Tung

Faculty Scholarship

The influence of banks and other private lenders pervades public companies. From the first day of a lending arrangement, loan covenants and built-in contingency provisions affect managerial decision making. Conventional corporate governance analysis has been slow to notice or account for this lender influence. Corporate governance discourse has traditionally focused only on corporate law arrangements. The few existing accounts of creditors' influence over firm managers emphasize the drastic actions creditors take in extreme cases - when a firm is in serious trouble - but in fact, private lender influence is a routine feature of corporate governance even absent financial distress. …


Innovation After The Revolution: Foreign Sovereign Bond Contracts Since 2003, Mitu Gulati, Anna Gelpern Jan 2009

Innovation After The Revolution: Foreign Sovereign Bond Contracts Since 2003, Mitu Gulati, Anna Gelpern

Faculty Scholarship

For over a decade, contracts literature has focused on standardization. Scholars asked how terms become standard, and why they change so rarely. This line of inquiry painted a world where a standard term persists until it is dislodged by another standard term, perhaps after a brief window of ferment before the second term takes hold. It also overshadowed the early insights of boilerplate theories, which described contracts as a mix of standard and customized terms, and asked why the mix might be suboptimal. This article brings the focus back to the mix. It examines the development of selected provisions in …


Do Differences In Pleading Standards Cause Forum Shopping In Securities Class Actions?: Doctrinal And Empirical Analyses, James D. Cox, Randall S. Thomas, Lynn Bai Jan 2009

Do Differences In Pleading Standards Cause Forum Shopping In Securities Class Actions?: Doctrinal And Empirical Analyses, James D. Cox, Randall S. Thomas, Lynn Bai

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Regulating Complexity In Financial Markets, Steven L. Schwarcz Jan 2009

Regulating Complexity In Financial Markets, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

As the financial crisis has tragically illustrated, the complexities of modern financial markets and investment securities can trigger systemic market failures. Addressing these complexities, this Article maintains, is perhaps the greatest financial-market challenge of the future. The Article first examines and explains the nature of these complexities. It then analyzes the regulatory and other steps that should be considered to reduce the potential for failure. Because complex financial markets resemble complex engineering systems, and failures in those markets have characteristics of failures in those systems, the Article‟s analysis draws on chaos theory and other approaches used to analyze complex engineering …


The Coroner’S Inquest: Ecuador’S Default And Sovereign Bond Documentation, Mitu Gulati, Lee C. Buchheit Jan 2009

The Coroner’S Inquest: Ecuador’S Default And Sovereign Bond Documentation, Mitu Gulati, Lee C. Buchheit

Faculty Scholarship

Conventional wisdom is that sovereigns will rarely, if ever, default on their external debts in circumstances where it is clear that they have the capacity to pay. The first line of defense against the errant sovereign is its concern about reputation. It may have to tap the external debt markets again in the future; and there is the fear that the markets will extract revenge. But reputational constraints do not always work because some governments heavily discount future costs in favor of current benefits. When reputational constraints fail, however, a second line of defense is supposed to come into play. …


Reinventing The Sec By Staring Into Its Past, James D. Cox Jan 2009

Reinventing The Sec By Staring Into Its Past, James D. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The ‘Principles’ Paradox, Steven L. Schwarcz Jan 2009

The ‘Principles’ Paradox, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This essay, prepared for a University of Cambridge conference on ‘Principles Versus Rules in Financial Regulation’, posits a new issue in that debate. Although principles-based regulation is thought to more closely achieve normative goals than rules, the extent to which that occurs can depend on the enforcement regime. A person who is subject to unpredictable liability is likely to hew to the most conservative interpretation of the principle, especially where that person would be a potential deep pocket in litigation. This creates a paradox: unless protected by a regime enabling one in good faith to exercise judgment without fear of …


The Future Of Securitization, Steven L. Schwarcz Jan 2009

The Future Of Securitization, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

Securitization, a process in which firms can raise low-cost financing by efficiently allocating asset risks with investor appetite for risk, has been one of the most dominant and fastest-growing means of capital formation in the United States and the world. The subprime financial crisis, however, has revealed certain defects with how securitization is sometimes utilized. This article examines these defects and the extent they can, and should, be remedied going forward.


Coping In A Global Marketplace: Survival Strategies For A 75-Year-Old Sec, James D. Cox Jan 2009

Coping In A Global Marketplace: Survival Strategies For A 75-Year-Old Sec, James D. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

Notwithstanding cynicism to the contrary, data bears witness to the fact that government agencies come and go. There are multiple causes that give rise to their disappearance but among the most powerful is that conditions that first gave rise to the particular agency's creation no longer exist so that the regulatory needs that once prevailed are no longer present or that there is a better governmental response than Congress' earlier embraced when it initially created an independent regulatory agency to address the problems needing to be addressed. Certainly the more rigid the regulatory authority conferred on an agency has much …


Keynote Address: The Conflicted Trustee Dilemma, Steven L. Schwarcz Jan 2009

Keynote Address: The Conflicted Trustee Dilemma, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Enhancing Investor Protection And The Regulation Of Securities Markets, John C. Coffee Jr. Jan 2009

Enhancing Investor Protection And The Regulation Of Securities Markets, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

This is the congressional testimony of Professor John C. Coffee, Jr., before the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, March 10, 2009.


Short Selling And The News: A Preliminary Report On Empirical Study, Merritt B. Fox, Lawrence R. Glosten, Paul C. Tetlock Jan 2009

Short Selling And The News: A Preliminary Report On Empirical Study, Merritt B. Fox, Lawrence R. Glosten, Paul C. Tetlock

Faculty Scholarship

No subject in securities regulation has generated more heat and less light than short selling. A short sale is the sale of a share that is borrowed from a third party rather than owned by the seller. At a later time, the short seller extinguishes her obligation to this third party by “covering” – purchasing an identical share in the market and then returning it to the third party. If the share price drops, the cost of covering will be less than the proceeds received earlier from the sale and the short seller will make money. Politicians and CEOs rail …


Public Ownership. Firm Governance, And Litigation Risk, Eric L. Talley Jan 2009

Public Ownership. Firm Governance, And Litigation Risk, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Many going-private transactions are motivated – at least ostensibly – by the desire to escape the burdens and costs of public ownership. Although these burdens have many purported manifestations, one commonly cited is the risk of litigation, which may be borne both directly by the firm and/or its fiduciaries or reflected in director and officer insurance premia funded at company expense. An important issue for the "litigation risk" justification of privatization is whether alternative (and less expensive) steps falling short of going private – such as governance reforms – may augur sufficiently against litigation exposure. In this Article, I consider …