Securities Law Commons^™

An Uphill Battle: The Difficulty Of Deterring And Detecting Perpetrators Of Internet Stock Fraud, Byron D. Hittle

Federal Communications Law Journal

This Note argues that because of the limited resources of the SEC, the demanding requirements to prove misrepresentation, the current lack of cooperation between federal and state securities regulators, and a perverse admiration for fraud masterminds, illegal stock price manipulators will continue to profit from unsuspecting investors. Various measures to curb Internet fraud, however, are currently being pondered by industry experts. Among the most effective and realistic are, in order: increasing investor education and awareness, increasing the SEC's "firepower," increasing penalties and jail time for offenders, furthering coordination of federal and state efforts, and creating a "seal of approval" for …

Liability Of Broker-Dealers For Unsuitable Recommendations To Institutional Investors, Norman S. Poser

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Securities Regulation, L. Briley Brisendine Jr.

Mercer Law Review

This Article surveys significant cases decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit during 1999 and 2000 in the field of securities regulation. This Article also examines one rule adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") during this survey period that affects Eleventh Circuit precedent.

• Safe Harbor for Forward-Looking Statement
• Judicial Notice of SEC Filings and Standard for Scienter Pleading
• "Knowing Possession" Test Adopted for Section 10(B) Fraud Claims

Limited Liability Companies And The Federal Securities Laws: Congress Should Amend The Securities Laws To Avoid Coverage, George A. Burke Jr.

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

"With Friends Like These ...": Toward A More Efficacious Response To Affinity-Based Securities And Investment Fraud, Lisa M. Fairfax

Faculty Scholarship

This article highlights the increase in affinity fraud—securities and investment fraud targeting members of a particular racial or ethnic group perpetrated either by a member of that group or someone claiming to advance the groups’ interests. Affinity fraud differs from other forms of securities fraud because perpetrators establish their credibility and the credibility of their investment schemes by appealing to the trust that group members share, often promising that some of the invested funds will be used to assist the group’s church or ethnic community. This reliance on group trust and sense of community persuades otherwise cautious people to participate …

The Tender Offer In Korea: An Analytic Comparison Between Korea And The United States, Kwang-Rok Kim

Washington International Law Journal

Even though the tender offer system in Korea was established in 1976, there were very few tender offer transactions until 1997. However, after Korea's economic crisis in late 1997, the Korean government not only took a series of structural reform measures to improve the securities market system, but also widely opened the financial markets to foreign countries by abolishing or amending restrictions on foreign investment. The 1998 reforms to the Korea Securities Exchange Act included significant changes to tender offer regulations, making hostile takeovers more feasible. Since that time, the tender offer has been used as a tool to acquire …

Information Technology And Non-Legal Sanctions In Financing Transactions, Ronald J. Mann

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Essay investigates the effect of advances in information technology on the private institutions that businesses use to resolve information asymmetries in financing transactions. The first part of the Essay discusses how information technology can permit direct verification of the information, obviating the problem entirely; the Essay discusses the example of the substitution of the debit card for the check, which provides an immediate payment that obviates the need for the merchant to consider whether payment will be forthcoming when the check is presented to the bank on which it is drawn.

The second part of the Essay discusses how …

Preserving Existing Security Interest Under Revised Article 9 Of The Uniform Commercial Code: A Concise Summary Of The Transition Rules And Some Recommendations For Secured Parties, Vincent Paul Cardi

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reviewing Article 8’S Revised Collusion Standard; Outside Counsel, Francis J. Facciolo

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The first published case to deal with the new collusion standard in revised Article 8 has been decided by Judge Bransten in Supreme Court, New York County. As New York City is the center of the securities industry, it is not surprising that the first published case to deal with collusion was decided here. The result reached by Judge Bransten, however, is surprising in the liberality with which collusion was construed.

An Outsider's View Of China's Insider Trading Law, Charles Zhen Qu

Washington International Law Journal

China's insider trading law can be found in the country's first unified securities industry law, Securities Law of the People's Republic of China, which came into force on July 1, 1999. The provisions of this law relating to insider trading, however, do not seem to help achieve the legislative purpose of the Securities Law, namely, to protect the interest of investors and promote the development of a socialist economy. The inadequacy of the current regime lies in the overly narrow definitions of "insider" and "inside information," the lack of workability of civil liability provisions, and the failure of China's Securities …

The Unclear "Clear And Unmistakable" Standard: Why Arbitrators, Not Courts, Should Determine Whether A Securities Investor's Claim Is Arbitrable, Guy Nelson

Vanderbilt Law Review

When an individual investor opens an account with a securities broker, the customer often must sign a standard-form contract as a precondition of conducting business with the broker. This non- negotiable contract, referred to as a Customer Agreement, generally contains an arbitration clause under which the parties agree to submit any future disputes to arbitration conducted by one of the securities industry's self-regulatory organizations ("SROs"). Proceedings initiated under the broad and inclusive arbitration clause are subject to the arbitration guidelines established by the SROs, a group which includes all the major stock exchanges. Virtually all brokers are members of an …

Ziggy Stardust Reborn: A Proposed Modification Of The Bowie Bond, Adam Grant

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Revised Article 9 Meets The Bankruptcy Code: Policy And Impact, (With C. Mooney, Jr.)., Steven L. Harris

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …

Hedge Funds, Hot Markets And The High Net Worth Investor: A Case For Greater Protection, Helen Parry

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

shares; that, if proprietary exchanges are allowed to act as regulators, they should be subject to some constraints as to how they perform this function; and that, contrary to the ordinary case where we have reason to believe that markets discipline firms, a vigorous market for control of exchanges could have harmful effects. The concern that underlies these conclusions is a concern that a country's national interest in protecting its domestic capital markets for the benefit of domestic enterprise and investors is likely to be undermined in a world where exchanges act just like any other business. Management, are clearly …

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 …

New Legislation Permitting Stock Futures: The Long And Winding Road, William J. Brodsky

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

This article will explain how the stock futures issue arose, how Congress handled it last year, and the application of the legislation to this new product. While I believe that the approach taken in the CFMA will allow stock futures to trade on a level regulatory playing field in many areas with stock options, which are regulated solely as securities, it will not remove all the disparities between these two competing products. That will only occur when Congress acquires the political will to merge the SEC and the CFTC to create a modem regulatory system for the U.S. equity markets.

Building A Strong Subnational Debt Market, Paul S. Maco

Richmond Journal of Global Law & Business

Decentralization of responsibility for finance and growing infrastructure needs are two trends that are expected to stimulate a growth in government borrowing at the sub-national level. Statistics for the first half of 2000 show a significant increase in sub-national debt volume, with global public finance, excluding Canada and the United States, more than doubling that of the first half of 1999.

They Toil Not, Neither Do They Spin: Civil Liability Under The Oregon Securities Law, Keith A. Rowley

Scholarly Works

Under Oregon law, persons who sell securities in violation of statutory registration requirements, or by means of some misrepresentation or omission of material fact, may be liable to any person or entity who buys securities from or through them. Likewise, persons who buy securities by means of some misrepresentation or omission of material fact may be liable to any person or entity who sells securities to or through them. In addition to, or in lieu of, suing the person who committed the material misrepresentation or omission, a plaintiff may sue one or more persons or entities who might be vicariously …

Regulation S - Rules Governing Offers And Sales Made Outside The United States Without Registration Under The Securities Act Of 1933, Caroline Mary Rutherford Lee

LLM Theses and Essays

Underpinning a regulatory regime is a dichotomy between achieving certainty of outcome and achieving perceived fairness. While such a discussion may seem out of place in the context of a regulatory regime dealing with offshore offerings, it nonetheless serves to emphasize some of the considerations encountered in the following examination of Regulation S. Part Two of this thesis outlines the development of the disclosure regime that is evidenced in the United States Federal Securities Regulations and then goes on to examine how this regime, first established in the 1930s, dealt with the advent of globalization. Part Three then looks at …

The Securities Globalization Disclosure Debate, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

A global market is developing for the shares of an increasing portion of the world’s 41,000 publicly-traded issuers. This trend has given rise to an active debate concerning what United States policy should be toward regulation of their disclosure practices. This Article is a comment on this debate through the eyes of an active participant

Don't Call Me A Securities Law Groupie: The Rise And Possible Demise Of The Group Pleading Protocol In 10b-5 Cases, William O. Fisher

Law Faculty Publications

Corporations often speak through documents. Some, like press releases, may not identify an author. Others, like 10-Ks, bear the signatures of many who did not write them but sign as required by law. In many cases, groups of individuals, working together, prepare these documents. When such documents contain misstatements, plaintiffs may not know initially who wrote them. To address this difficulty, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Ninth and Second Circuits created a judge-made pleading protocol. This protocol permits plaintiffs to name officers, and in some cases directors, as defendants in securities fraud cases without pleading specific facts to …

Disclosure Norms, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this Article is to interrogate the relationship between judicial error and extralegal norms more formally, focusing particularly on typical corporate disclosure contexts. In so doing, I shall argue that this relationship is far less clear-cut than much of the literature suggests. Using a formal, game-theoretic model of information disclosure, I demonstrate that in the presence of judicial error, a society that benefits from extralegal norms of honest disclosure might ironically favor more expansive legal regulation than would a similarly situated society in which norms are weak or nonexistent. Thus, in contrast to the common argument that norms …

Competition Among Securities Markets: A Path Dependent Perspective, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Today, there are an estimated 150 securities exchanges trading stocks around the world. Tomorrow (or at least within the reasonably foreseeable future), this number is likely to shrink radically. The two great forces reshaping the contemporary world – globalization and technology – impact the world of securities markets in a similar and mutually reinforcing fashion:

1. they force local and regional markets into more direct competition with distant international markets;
2. they increase overall market capitalization and lower the cost of equity capital, as issuers are enabled to access multiple markets; and
3. they permit order flow and liquidity to migrate quickly from …

Unocal Fifteen Year Later (And What We Can Do About It), Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

The coincidence of the new millennium and the fifteenth anniversary of the Delaware Supreme Court's announcement of a new approach to takeover law provides an occasion to evaluate a remarkable experiment in corporate law – the Delaware Supreme Court's development of an intermediate standard of review for appraising defensive tactics. This assessment reveals that Unocal has developed into an unexplained and likely inexplicable preference that control contests be resolved through elections rather than through market transactions. In doing so, the remarkable struggle between the chancery court and the supreme court for Unocal's soul is canvassed. The author also maintains that …

Tax Constraints On Indexed Options, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

Indexed stock option grants reward executives for outperforming a benchmark, such as the market as a whole or competitors in the same industry. These options offer superior incentives by limiting the influence of factors beyond an executive's control, such as general market and industry conditions. Yet indexed options are almost never used. Professor Saul Levmore seeks to explain this puzzle with norms. This comment on his article argues that tax plays a larger role in this puzzle than he acknowledges, although tax is not a complete explanation. Accounting and Professor Levmore's norms-based account are then briefly considered.

Regulatory Initiatives And The Internet: A New Era Of Oversight For The Securities And Exchange Commission, Roberta S. Karmel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Litigation Governance: A Gentle Critique Of The Third Circuit Task Force Report, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The Third Circuit Task Force on the Selection of Class Counsel (the "Task Force") has worked hard, considered everything, and exhaustively summarized the problems associated with class counsel auctions. Its views will undoubtedly resonate with most of the Bench and the vast majority of the Bar-neither of whom were enthusiastic about the prospect of auctions in the first place. Personally, I agree with the Task Force that auctions are not the most promising reform and that they may exacerbate, rather than correct, existing problems. Still, what is missing from the Task Force Report is the candid recognition that the agency …

Company Registration And The Private Placement Exemption, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last twenty years, there has been a steady shift in securities disclosure regulation away from its traditional transactional basis toward a system of company registration. Under the transaction based approach, each new public offering of a security has to be registered under the Securities Act of 1933 (the "1933 Act"), a requirement that reflects the SEC's traditional concern that the most important time to have high-quality disclosure is at the moment of a securities offering. Under the company registration approach, an established, publicly traded issuer would register just once, provide information thereafter on a periodic basis, and then …

On Insider Trading, Markets, And Negative Property Rights In Information, Zohar Goshen, Gideon Parchomovsky

Faculty Scholarship

Few issues have sparked as much debate and disagreement among Law and Economics scholars as the prohibition on insider trading. Ironically, the Supreme Court's attempts in Chiarella v. United States, Dirks v. Securities and Exchange Commission, and, most recently, in United States v. O'Hagan to clarify the scope and content of the ban on insider trading, and the subsequent reaction of the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), have only added fuel to the fire of the academic debate already raging on the issue.

The most intriguing feature of the debate on insider trading is that all contributors seek to promote …