Securities Law Commons^™

Regulation Of Companies With Publicly Listed Share Capital In The People's Republic Of China, Nicholas C. Howson

Articles

Mr. Chairman, colleagues, and friends: It is a great honor for me to be able to address this group of experts and legislators, and many colleagues and friends, on a topic I care deeply about-the regulation of so-called public companies, both outside of China and, since the early 1990s, inside of China. First, and with many of the others invited to participate in this conference today and tomorrow, I thank the Office of Legislative Affairs ("OLA") of the State Council of the People's Republic of China ("PRC") as well as the China Securities Regulatory Commission ("CSRC") for convening this very …

What Counts As Fraud? An Empirical Study Of Motions To Dismiss Under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, Adam C. Pritchard, Hillary A. Sale

Articles

This article presents the findings of a study of the resolution of motions to dismiss securities fraud lawsuits since the passage of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA) in 1995. Our sample consists of decisions on motions to dismiss in securities class actions by district and appellate courts in the Second and Ninth Circuits for cases filed after the passage of the Reform Act to the end of 2002. These circuits are the leading circuits for the filing of securities class actions and are generally recognized as representing two ends of the securities class action spectrum. Post-PSLRA, the Second …

Should Issuers Be On The Hook For Laddering? An Empirical Analysis Of The Ipo Market Manipulation Litigation, Adam C. Pritchard, Stephen J. Choi

Articles

On December 6, 2000, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story exposing abuses in the market for initial public offerings (IPOs). The story revealed "tie-in" agreements between investment banks and initial investors seeking to participate in "hot" offerings. Under those agreements, initial investors would commit to buy additional shares of the offering company's stock in secondary market trading in return for allocations of shares in the IPO. As the Wall Street Journal related, those "[c]ommitments to buy in the after-market lock in demand for additional stock at levels above the IPO price. As such, they provide the rocket fuel …

Exchanges Of Multiple Stocks And Securities In Corporate Divisions Or Acquisitive Reorganizations, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey S. Lehman

Articles

If specified conditions are satisfied, the Internal Revenue Code provides nonrecognition for gain or loss realized when stocks and securities of one corporation are exchanged for stocks and securities of another corporation. When the exchange is made as part of a corporate division (a split-off or a split-up), the principal nonrecognition provision is section 355; and when the exchange is made as part of an acquisitive reorganization, the principal nonrecognition provision is section 354. Complete nonrecognition is provided only when stock is exchanged solely for stock and securities are exchanged solely for securities of no greater principal amount. If, in …

Law, Share Price Accuracy, And Economic Performance: The New Evidence, Merritt B. Fox, Randall Morck, Bernard Yeung, Artyom Durnev

Michigan Law Review

Mandatory disclosure has been at the core of U.S. securities regulation since its adoption in the early 1930s. For many decades, this fixture of our financial system was accepted with little examination. Over the last twenty years, however, mandatory disclosure has been subject to intensifying intellectual crosscurrents. Some commentators hold out the U.S. system as the standard for the world. They argue that adoption by other countries of a U.S.-styled system, with its greater corporate transparency, would enhance their economic performance. Other commentators, in contrast, insist that the U.S. mandatory disclosure regime represents a mistake, not a model. These crosscurrents …

Standing Up To Wall Street (And Congress), Richard W. Painter

Michigan Law Review

In 1992, Arthur Levitt co-chaired a fundraising dinner for William Clinton. The dinner raised $750,000 (p. 7). Clinton was elected President, and Levitt got the job he wanted: Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Levitt, a former Chairman of the American Stock Exchange and a connected Democrat, was well qualified for the job. His, however, became a pyrrhic victory when accountants, issuers, broker-dealers, and other special interests used their own political connections to frustrate just about everything he sought to do. Levitt tells the story of his struggle against these well-funded interests in Take on the Street. One of …

Beyond The Business Judgment Rule: Protecting Bidder Firm Shareholders From Value-Reducing Acquisitions, Ryan Houseal

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

During the takeover transactions of the 1980s, bidder firms paid target firm shareholders average premiums of approximately 50% for their shares. Did the sizable premiums paid to target firm shareholders during the 1980s reflect post-takeover improvement in the target's performance? Or were the premiums a result of the mismanagement of the bidder firms' assets?

The answer will help determine whether additional legal mechanisms should be established to protect bidder firm shareholders from the threat of management's consummation of value reducing acquisitions. Accordingly, this Note examines various studies which attempt to identify the source of the premiums paid to target firm …

Should Congress Repeal Securities Class Action Reform?, Adam C. Pritchard

Other Publications

The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 was designed to curtail class action lawsuits by the plaintiffs’ bar. In particular, the high-technology industry, accountants, and investment bankers thought that they had been unjustly victimized by class action lawsuits based on little more than declines in a company’s stock price. Prior to 1995, the plaintiffs’ bar had free rein to use the discovery process to troll for evidence to support its claims. Moreover, the high costs of litigation were a powerful weapon with which to coerce companies to settle claims. The plaintiffs’ bar and its allies in Congress have called …

Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. And The Counterrevolution In The Federal Securities Laws, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

The confirmation of Lewis F. Powell, Jr., to the Supreme Court coincided with a dramatic shift in the Court's approach to securities law. This Article documents Powell's influence in changing the Court's direction in securities law. Powell's influence was the product of his extensive experience with the securities laws as a corporate lawyer, which gave him much greater familiarity with that body of law than his fellow Justices had. That experience also made him skeptical of civil liability, particularly class and derivative actions. Powell's skepticism led him to interpret the securities law in a consistently narrow fashion to reduce liability …

Behavioral Economics And The Sec, Stephen J. Choi, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

Not all investors are rational. Quite apart from the obvious examples of credulity in the face of the latest Ponzi scheme, there is no shortage of evidence that many investors' decisions are influenced by systematic biases that impair their abilities to maximize their investment returns. For example, investors will often hold onto poorly performing stocks longer than warranted, hoping to recoup their losses. Other investors will engage in speculative trading, dissipating their returns by paying larger commissions than more passive investors. And we are not just talking about widows and orphans here. There is evidence that supposedly sophisticated institutional investors-mutual …

Self-Regulation And Securities Markets, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

Enron, Arthur Andersen, Tyco, ImClone, WorldCom, Adelphia - as American investors reel from accounting scandals and self-dealing by corporate insiders, the question of trust in the securities markets has taken on a new urgency. Securities markets cannot operate without trust. Markets known for fraud, insider trading, and manipulation risk a downward spiral as investors depart in search of safer investments. Today, many investors are rethinking the wisdom of entrusting their financial futures to the stock market. Absent trust in the integrity of the securities markets, individuals will hoard their money under the proverbial mattress.

Too Busy To Mind The Business? Monitoring By Directors With Multiple Board Appointments, Stephen P. Ferris, Murali Jagannathan, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

We examine the number of external appointments held by corporate directors. Directors who serve larger firms and sit on larger boards are more likely to attract directorships. Consistent with Fama and Jensen (1983), we find that firm performance has a positive effect on the number of appointments held by a director. We find no evidence that multiple directors shirk their responsibilities to serve on board committees. We do not find that multiple directors are associated with a greater likelihood of securities fraud litigation. We conclude that the evidence does not support calls for limits on directorships held by an individual.

Back To The 1930s? The Shaky Case For Exempting Dividends, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

This article is based in part on the author’s U.S. Branch Report for Subject I of the 2003 Annual Congress of the International Fiscal Association, to be held next year in Sydney, Australia (forthcoming in Cahiers de droit fiscal international, 2003). He would like to thank Emil Sunley for his helpful comments on that earlier version, and Steve Bank, Michael Barr, David Bradford, Michael Graetz, and David Hasen for comments on this version. Special thanks are due to Yoram Keinan for his meticulous work on the EU regimes (see Appendix). All errors are the author’s. In this report, Prof. Avi-Yonah …

Internalizing Outsider Trading, Ian Ayres, Stephen Choi

Michigan Law Review

Investing in the United States has become a hobby for many. Individual ownership of equity, moreover, has increased over the past decade due in part to the introduction of internet-based trading. While providing the possibility for greater returns compared with bank savings accounts, among other investment alternatives, the public capital markets also pose greater risks for investors. Many individual investors lack both the resources and the incentive to analyze the value of any particular security in the market. Such investors thus trade at a systematic disadvantage relative to more informed parties. In response, regulators have asserted that certain informational disparities …

Venture Capital On The Downside: Preferred Stock And Corporate Control, William W. Bratton

Michigan Law Review

When stock indices drop precipitously, when the startup companies fizzle out, and when it stops raining money on places like Wall Street and Silicon Valley, attention turns to downside contracting. Law and business lawyers, sitting in the back seat as mere facilitators on the upside, move up to the front and sometimes even take the wheel. The job is the same on both the upside and downside: to maximize the value of going concern assets. But what comes easily on the upside can be dirty work on the down, where assets need to be separated from dysfunctional teams of business …

Who Cares?, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

Jim Cox and Randall Thomas have identified an interesting phenomenon in their contribution to this symposium: institutional investors seem to be systematically "leaving money on the table" in securities fraud class actions. For someone who approaches legal questions from an economic perspective, the initial response to this claim is disbelief. As the joke goes, economists do not bend over to pick up twenty-dollar bills on the street. The economist knows that the twenty dollars must be an illusion. In a world of rational actors, someone else already would have picked up that twenty-dollar bill, so the effort spent bending over …

Statutes With Multiple Personality Disorders: The Value Of Ambiguity In Statutory Design And Interpretation, Joseph A. Grundfest, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

Ambiguity serves a legislative purpose. When legislators perceive a need to compromise they can, among other strategies, "obscur[e] the particular meaning of a statute, allowing different legislators to read the obscured provisions the way they wish." Legislative ambiguity reaches its peak when a statute is so elegantly crafted that it credibly supports multiple inconsistent interpretations by legislators and judges. Legislators with opposing views can then claim that they have prevailed in the legislative arena, and, as long as courts continue to issue conflicting interpretations, these competing claims of legislative victory remain credible. Formal legal doctrine, in contrast, frames legislative ambiguity …

In Re Silicon Graphics Inc.: Shareholder Wealth Effects Resulting From The Interpretation Of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act's Pleading Standard., Adam C. Pritchard, Marilyn F. Johnson, Karen K. Nelson

Articles

This Article presents an empirical study of changes in shareholder wealth resulting from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in In re Silicon Graphics Inc. Securities Litigation, which interpreted the pleading provision established in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (the "Reform Act"). Congress passed the Reform Act as part of an ongoing effort to protect corporations from abusive suits alleging "fraud by hindsight." In such suits, plaintiffs claimed that a sudden drop in a company's stock price was evidence that the issuer and its management covered up the bad news that led to the price drop. …

The Anticompetitive Effect Of Passive Investment, David Gilo

Michigan Law Review

There are many cases in which a firm passively invests in its competitor. For example, Microsoft passively invested in $150 million worth of the nonvoting stock of Apple, its historic rival in the operating systems market. Also, in November 1998, Northwest Airlines, the nation's fourth-largest airline, purchased 14% of the common stock of Continental Airlines Inc., the nation's fifth-largest (and fastest growing) airline. Northwest competes with Continental on seven routes, serving 3.6 million passengers per year. In another example, TCI, the nation's largest cable operator, became a passive investor with a 9% stake (which can be increased, under the terms …

Looking A Gift Horse In The Mouth: An Analysis Of Free Internet Stock Offerings, Joel Michael Schwarz

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

How much should an investor pay for one share of stock in Yahoo? Or a share of stock in America Online? As publicly traded companies, one need only consult the stock charts in any local newspaper to determine the value the market has placed on these shares. Despite what many Internet sector analysts have professed to be astronomically high valuations, these publicly traded companies possess easily verifiable valuations determined by the free market forces that constitute the building blocks of our economy, and safeguarded by the oversight of federal regulators such as the Securities & Exchange Commission ("SEC"). But what …

Pleading Under Section 11 Of The Securities Act Of 1933, Krista L. Turnquist

Michigan Law Review

The Securities Act of 1933 ("Securities Act") requires full and fair disclosure of the nature of securities sold in interstate and foreign commerce. Section 11 of the Securities Act prohibits false or misleading registration statements. It also provides buyers a private remedy for false or misleading statements against any signer of the registration statement, any partner or director of the issuer, any professional involved in preparing or certifying the statement, and any underwriter. The rule appears simple: if there is a material misstatement or omission in the registration statement, the buyer may sue the seller. Courts disagree, however, over how …

Constitutional Federalism, Individual Liberty, And The Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act Of 1998, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

This Article proceeds in four parts. Part I provides background on the historical development of constitutional federalism, the Supreme Court's decisions in this area, and the apparent demise of constitutional limits on federal power. Part II then reviews the Court's revival of constitutional federalism over the last decade. Based on this review, I argue that the Supreme Court's current federalism doctrine can be understood as a "constrained libertarianism" that attempts to use constitutional structure as a check on government interference with individual liberty. In this model, states are respected in our constitutional system because of the counterbalance that they provide …

In Re Silicon Graphics Inc.: Shareholder Wealth Effects Resulting From The Interpretation Of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act's Pleading Standard, Marilyn F. Johnson, Karen K. Nelson, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

This Article presents an empirical study of changes in shareholder wealth resulting from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in In re Silicon Graphics Inc. Securities Litigation, which interpreted the pleading provision established in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (the "Reform Act"). Congress passed the Reform Act as part of an ongoing effort to protect corporations from abusive suits alleging "fraud by hindsight." In such suits, plaintiffs claimed that a sudden drop in a company's stock price was evidence that the issuer and its management covered up the bad news that led to the price drop. …

Empirical Insight And Some Thoughts On Future(S) Investigation: Comments On Mark West's 'Private Ordering At The World's First Futures Exchange', A.W. Brian Simpson

Michigan Law Review

Some considerable number of years ago, when I was in Chicago, I had a plan to undertake a general study of the origins of futures markets. They fascinated me for a variety of reasons, one being their bizarre nature: traders meeting together, usually in some form of ring, in order to sell, on a huge scale, quantities of commodities which they neither possess, nor intend to possess, to other traders, who have not the least wish to receive such commodities, and nowhere to put them if they did. At first sight it appears a weird perversion of the institution of …

A Public Choice Approach To Private Ordering: Rent-Seeking At The World's First Futures Exchange: Comments On Mark West's 'Private Ordering At The World's First Futures Exchange', Omri Yadlin

Michigan Law Review

The literature on private ordering systems has expanded exponentially over the last decade. Yet, very few scholars have actually attempted to define the term "private ordering" - a failure that sometimes leads to confusion. Some scholars identify private ordering with non-state ordering. According to this view, the private legal systems Robert Ellickson, Lisa Bernstein, McMillan & Woodruff, Mark West, and others have investigated are "private" simply because their norms are not manufactured or enforced by the state. The alternative view emphasizes the decentralized feature of private ordering systems. Robert Ellickson, for example, studied "how people manage to interact to mutual …

A Commerce Clause Challenge To New York's Tax Deduction For Investment In Its Own Tuition Savings Program, Amy Remus Scott

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Internal Revenue Code provides guidelines for states to create and maintain college tuition savings programs which offer federal tax benefits to investors. Several states have enacted tuition savings plans in accordance with these guidelines. In addition to the federal tax benefits allowed, New York offers a state tax deduction to New York residents who invest in its plan, the New York College Choice Tuition Savings Program. New York does not offer the deduction, however, to residents who invest in comparable programs offered by other states. The tax deduction thus creates an incentive for residents to invest in the in-state …

Moving Toward A Clearer Definition Of Insider Trading: Why Adoption Of The Possession Standard Protects Investors, Lacey S. Calhoun

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In recent years, insider trading has become a publicized focus of securities law enforcement. The definition of insider trading has emerged slowly through case law, and the term has been clarified by new theories of liability. The use and possession tests are two standards of liability used to judge the treatment of inside information. The use standard offers a defense to insider trading liability while the possession standard premises liability on mere possession of inside information. This Note argues that courts should adopt the possession standard because this standard better protects investors, a primary goal of the Securities Exchange Act …

A Case-By-Case Approach To Pleading Scienter Under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act Of 1995, Matthew Roskoski

Michigan Law Review

Securities fraud litigation under Rule lOb-5 threatens all publicly traded companies: according to the Stanford Securities Class Action Clearinghouse, in 1998 a securities fraud lawsuit was filed for nearly every day that the stock markets were open. Some of these lawsuits appear to be frivolous, triggered by inevitable fluctuations in stock prices (so-called "fraud by hindsight" complaints), while others represent legitimate efforts at private enforcement of the securities laws. Disposition on the pleadings is a critical defense strategy for all securities lawsuits. Securities fraud lawsuits that withstand a 12(b)(6) motion almost always settle, regardless of the actual merits of the …

The Limited Public Offer In German And U.S. Securities Law: A Comparative Analysis Of Prospectus Act Section 2(2) And Rule 505 Of Regulation D, David B. Guenther

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Note examines the "limited circle of persons" exception in section 2(2) of the Prospectus Act in comparison to similar provisions of U.S. federal securities law, particularly Section 3(b) of the Securities Act of 1933 (the "Securities Act") and Rule 505 of Regulation D ("Rule 505"). Comparison of the Prospectus Act to U.S. securities law seems both warranted and useful. Certain aspects of German securities law are broadly modeled on U.S. precedents. U.S. securities laws reflect more than sixty-five years of experience defining (and re-defining) public and limited public offers and private placements. U.S. securities regulators have also displayed in …

Disclosure In Global Securities Offerings: Analysis Of Jurisdictional Approaches, Commonality And Reciprocity, Marc I. Steinberg, Lee E. Michaels

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article presents a summary of the regulatory systems currently in place in the world's major markets. This summary focuses primarily on the disclosure rules that must be followed by a company undertaking an equity offering in each country. Certain significant accounting standards also are discussed. After comparing the different disclosure frameworks, the article addresses efforts that have been made to regulate or standardize the world's markets on a more international level. Finally, the article discusses where we should go next in the quest to create greater harmony in a truly global marketplace.