Securities Law Commons^™

Reading Reflection Privacy And Security, Paul Sujith Rayi

School of Information Studies - Post-doc and Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Texas Gulf Sulphur: A Case Study On Responding To Market Rumors, Wendy Gerwick Couture

Articles

This essay uses Texas Gulf Sulphur as a case study on an issue that companies continue to face today: whether, and how, to respond to market rumors. This essay analyzes the countervailing incentives that influence whether companies respond to market rumors, applies those pressures to the facts of Texas Gulf Sulphur, and concludes that counsel today would likely advise similarly situated companies to remain silent rather than respond to market rumors. Drawing therefrom, this essay argues that silence is not the socially optimal response and that the dueling pressures on companies should be adjusted to incentivize companies to respond to …

The Case For Investor Ordering, Scott Hirst

Faculty Scholarship

Whether corporate arrangements should be mandated by public law or “privately ordered” by corporations themselves has been a foundational question in corporate law scholarship. State corporation laws are generally privately ordered. But a significant and growing number of arrangements are governed by “corporate regulations” created by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). SEC corporate regulations are invariably mandatory. Whether they should be is the focus of this Article.
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/="/">This Article contributes to the ongoing debate by showing that whether mandatory or privately-ordered rules are optimal depends on the nature of investors, and their incentives in choosing corporate …

Regulating The “Too Big To Jail” Financial Institutions, Jerry W. Markham

Brooklyn Law Review

This article addresses the “too big to jail” regulatory model in which large banks pay hundreds of billions of dollars to settle multiple and duplicative regulatory charges brought by a horde of state, federal, and even foreign regulators. The banks pay those massive settlements in order to keep their banking charters and to obtain immunity from prosecution for senior executives. In turn, regulators benefit from the headlines these fines generate. Much criticism has been directed at these settlements because the banks are allowed to continue business as usual and no senior executives are jailed. Other critics contend that these settlements …

Opacity, Fragility, & Power: Lessons From The Law Enforcement Response To The Financial Crisis, Gregory M. Gilchrist

Brooklyn Law Review

Review of Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez, THE CARE FOR THE CORPORATE DEATH PENALTY: RESTORING LAW AND ORDER ON WALL STREET (New York 2017) The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty, by Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez, argues that the limited law enforcement response to the 2008 financial crisis represented an unprecedented failure of the rule of law. It further maintains that the weak response by law enforcement was caused by the economic and political power of the largest financial institutions and those who run them. It concludes that the failure to vigorously prosecute the people …

Foreign Initial Coin Offering Issuers Beware: The Securities And Exchange Commission Is Watching, Julianna Debler

Cornell International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Investors' Paradox, Anita K. Krug

Articles

For the first time in an era, new investment products for smaller ("retail ") investors are emerging. These products are mutual funds that engage in the types of trading and investment activities that have long been the province of sophisticated investors. Accordingly, the new funds (called "alternative funds") promise to reduce the gulf between retail investors and their sophisticated counterparts, in terms of portfolio diversification and investment results.

This Article describes the complex mix of factors that spawned alternative funds and critically evaluates the funds' potential, the first scholarly work to do so. It additionally unearths the paradox that impedes …

Sexual Harassment And Corporate Law, Daniel Hemel, Dorothy S. Lund

Faculty Scholarship

The #MeToo movement has shaken corporate America in recent months, leading to the departures of several high-profile executives as well as sharp stock price declines at a number of firms. Investors have taken notice and taken action: Shareholders at more than a half dozen publicly traded companies have filed lawsuits since the start of 2017 alleging that corporate fiduciaries breached state law duties or violated federal securities laws in connection with sexual harassment scandals. Additional suits are likely in the coming months.

This Article examines the role of corporate and securities law in regulating and remedying workplace sexual misconduct. We …

Informed Trading And Its Regulation, Merritt B. Fox, Lawrence R. Glosten, Gabriel Rauterberg

Faculty Scholarship

Informed trading – trading on information not yet reflected in a stock’s price – drives the stock market. Such informational advantages can arise from astute analysis of varied pieces of public news, from just released public information, or from confidential information from inside a firm. We argue that these disparate types of trading are all better regulated as part of the broader phenomenon of informed trading. Informed trading makes share prices more accurate, enhancing the allocation of capital, but also makes markets less liquid, which is costly to the efficiency of trade. Informed trading thus poses a fundamental trade-off in …

How Investors Can (And Can't) Create Social Value, Paul Brest, Ronald J. Gilson, Mark A. Wolfson

Faculty Scholarship

Most investors throughout the world have a single goal: to earn the highest risk- adjusted financial returns. They would not accept a lower financial return from an investment that also produced social benefits.

More recently, an increasing number of socially-motivated investors have goals beyond maximizing returns. They also seek to align their investments with their social values (value alignment), and some also seek to cause the companies in which they invest to create more social value as a result of their investment (social value creation). We show in this essay that while it is relatively easy to achieve value alignment, …

Insider Trading And The Myth Of Market Confidence, John P. Anderson

Journal Articles

This Article challenges the validity of the market-confidence claim as a justification for the regulation of insider trading on two grounds. First, insofar as it relies on a sociopsychological claim-that most investors perceive insider trading as economically harmful or morally wrong-it is subject to the problem of false consciousness (i.e., the psychological claim could be true though the shared belief is demonstrably false). Second, even if the problem of false consciousness is set aside, the market-confidence argument's empirical claims of a chilling effect among potential investors must be proven, not simply assumed.

The Regulation Of Trading Markets: A Survey And Evaluation, Paul G. Mahoney, Gabriel V. Rauterberg

Book Chapters

This chapter was prepared for a conference exploring the desirability and structure of a new special study of the securities markets. Our objective is not to resolve all of the questions that commentators have raised about the new equity markets, but to lay the groundwork for a new special study by surveying the state of market regulation, identifying issues, and offering preliminary evaluations.

Sunrise, Sunset: An Empirical And Theoretical Assessment Of Dual-Class Stock Structures, Andrew William Winden

UF Law Faculty Publications

A battle is brewing for control of America’s most dynamic companies. Entrepreneurs are increasingly seeking protection from interference or dismissal by public investors through the adoption of dual-class stock structures in initial public offerings. Institutional investors are pushing back, demanding that sucks structures be abandoned or strictly limited through subset provisions. The actual terms of dual-class stock structures, however, have been remarkably understudied, so the debate between proponents of prohibition and private ordering is ill-informed. This paper presents the first empirical analysis of the initial, or sunrise, and terminal, or sunset, provisions found in the charters of dual-class companies, with …

Are Charter Schools The Second Coming Of Enron?: An Examination Of The Gatekeepers That Protect Against Dangerous Related-Party Transactions In The Charter School Sectors, Preston C. Green Iii, Bruce D. Baker, Joseph O. Oluwole

Indiana Law Journal

INTRODUCTION

OVERVIEW OF ENRON

A. ENRON AND DEREGULATION

B. THE LJM SPES

C. ENRON’S COLLAPSE

II: ENRON’S GATEKEEPER PROBLEMS

A. ARTHUR ANDERSEN

B. INDEPENDENT ANALYSTS

C. CREDIT RATING AGENCIES

D. ENRON’S BOARD OF DIRECTORS

E. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION (SEC)

III: CHARTER SCHOOLS AND RELATED-PARTY TRANSACTIONS

A. CHARTER SCHOOL DEREGULATION AND PRIVATE INVESTORS

B. EXAMPLES OF ENRON-LIKE RELATED-PARTY TRANSACTIONS

1. IMAGINE SCHOOLS

2. IVY ACADEMIA CHARTER SCHOOL

3. AMERICAN INDIAN MODEL CHARTER SCHOOLS

4. GRAND TRAVERSE ACADEMY

5. PENNSYLVANIA CYBER CHARTER SCHOOL

C. THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, RELATED-PARTY TRANSACTIONS, AND THE NEED FOR STRONG GATEKEEPING

IV: CHARTER SCHOOL GATEKEEPERS

A. AUDITORS …

The Icarus Syndrome: How Credit Rating Agencies Lost Their Quasi Immunity, Norbert Gaillard, Michael Waibel

SMU Law Review

Subsequent to the 2007–2008 subprime crisis, the SEC and the US Senate discovered that it was common practice for major credit rating agencies (CRAs) to produce inflated and inaccurate structured finance ratings. A host of explanations were posited on how this was able to happen from the “issuer pays” model of CRAs and conflicts of interest to underscoring the CRA’s regulatory license and their ensuing insulation from legal liability. Historically, credit ratings were akin to opinions. However, when courts started to consider structured finance ratings as commercial speech in the 2000s, CRAs became more vulnerable to litigation. This article studies …

Equal Access To Information: The Fraud At The Heart Of Texas Gulf Sulphur, Stephen M. Bainbridge

SMU Law Review

The Texas Gulf Sulphur decision was the seminal moment in the creation of the modern federal insider trading prohibition. In the half century since it was decided, however, courts and commentators have overlooked the glaring flaw in the court’s analysis.

In the key part of the opinion, in which the court laid out the equal access standard, the court grossly misrepresented the precedents on which it relied. The court cited two state law opinions that were wholly irrelevant to the problem at hand. It cited two law review articles, but those articles sim- ply do not say what the court …

Seeking An Objective For Regulating Insider Trading Through Texas Gulf Sulphur, James D. Cox

SMU Law Review

Data summarized in the opening of this article document shows that in- side trading is a growth industry. And, as deals get ever bigger, the growth curve becomes steeper as more the data confirms intuition that the more who know about a good thing the more who will seek to harvest its bene- fits. Even though insider trading appears to have thrived during the fifty years after Texas Gulf Sulphur, we gather in this symposium to celebrate the decision. But why? As developed below, the Second Circuit’s landmark decision gave way to the Supreme Court’s erection of a fiduciary frame- …

Texas Gulf Sulphur And Information Disclosure Policy, Onnig H. Dombalagian

SMU Law Review

Texas Gulf Sulphur’s bold ultimatum—"disclose or abstain”— enjoys an enduring place of prominence in discussions of insider trading law be- cause of the intuitive simplicity with which it asserts the expectations of investors in securities markets. As the law of information dissemination has developed into a distinct subset of federal securities law over the past fifty years, however, it is equally important to reflect on how the Texas Gulf Sulphur opinion has shaped the views of courts and regulators in crafting rules and guidelines for information disclosure. Indeed, Texas Gulf Sulphur anticipated—and continues to inform—contemporary debates relating to the dissemination …

Constructive Ambiguity And Judicial Development Of Insider Trading, Jill E. Fisch

SMU Law Review

The Texas Gulf Sulphur decision began what has become a fifty-year project of developing U.S. insider trading regulation through judicial law- making. During the course of that project, the courts developed a complex, fraud-based approach to determining the scope of liability. The approach has led, in many cases, to doctrinal uncertainty, a result that is reflected in the recent decisions in Newman, Salman, and Martoma.

In the face of this uncertainty, many commentators have called for a legislative solution. This article argues, however, that the true challenge of insider trading regulation is a lack of consensus about the appropriate scope …

Insider Trading, Tamar Frankel

SMU Law Review

This article focuses on the nature and position of corporate insiders. The discussion leads to a suggestion that one punishment of insiders who misappropriated what is not theirs—the information—is to disqualify them for a position of corporate power.

Will Fifty Years Of The Sec’S Disgorgement Remedy Be Abolished?, Roberta S. Karmel

SMU Law Review

SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur was the first case holding that equitable relief, and specifically disgorgement, can be obtained by the SEC in a federal court action for an injunction against insider trading. Such ancillary equitable relief has been obtained in numerous cases during the fifty years since Texas Gulf was decided. But, the continued availability of the remedy of disgorgement has been thrown into question by the recent Supreme Court case of Kokesh v. SEC, in which the Supreme Court held disgorgement to be a penalty for purposes of the federal statute of limitations. The Court identified, but …

From Texas Gulf Sulphur To Laudato Si’: Mining Equitable Principles From Insider Trading Law, Michael J. Kaufman

SMU Law Review

In SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur, the Second Circuit declared that all investors trading on impersonal exchanges should have equal access to material information, and therefore anyone who possesses material inside information must either turn it over to the investing public or not trade. The broad reach of that insider trading prohibition sent shock waves throughout the financial markets and encountered significant judicial resistance from the Supreme Court.

Although the Supreme Court initially rejected the insider trading prohibition announced in Texas Gulf Sulphur, the fundamental equitable trading principles underlying that decision have endured. This article shows that TGS was …

Thinking Fast And Slow About The Concept Of Materiality, Mark J. Loewenstein

SMU Law Review

Determining whether, for securities law purposes, a misrepresentation or omission is material raises interesting questions. The Court of Appeals in SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co. provided some guidance on materiality, and the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in several times in the past 50 years. This article first discusses what Texas Gulf Sulphur contributed to the doctrine of materiality, then briefly considers other dimensions of the doctrine, and finally moves to its thesis: The doctrine of materiality should take into account important psychological insights and heuristics that may affect the way that a fact finder decides whether a misrepresentation …

From Texas Gulf Sulphur To Chiarella: A Tale Of Two Duties, Donald C. Langevoort

SMU Law Review

This short essay tells the story of two distinct journeys begun in SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur—one dealing with insider trading, the other with corporate liability for false corporate publicity. The first involves the “equal access” principle planted therein and then harshly discarded by the Supreme Court twelve years later in Chiarella v. United States. My claim is that marketplace egalitarianism never had much traction in the period from TGS to Chiarella, and was largely dead by the time the Court officially extinguished it. By that time, it played mainly a boogeyman role. The second journey had a different fate: …

Martoma And Newman: Valid Corporate Purpose And The Personal Benefit Test, Jonathan R. Macey

SMU Law Review

The law of insider trading in the United States is fundamentally grounded on a theory of property rights in information. Those to whom property rights in information have been allocated may trade without violating the prohibitions on trading contained in § 10(b) of the Securities Ex- change Act. Similarly, those who use material, nonpublic information for a valid corporate purpose have not violated the law. On the other hand, those who pilfer for personal gain material inside information belonging to a corporation do so at their legal peril. Those with property rights in inside information may authorize others to trade …

Taming Rule 10b-5-1: The Unfinished Business Of Texas Gulf Sulphur, Daniel J. Morrissey

SMU Law Review

Insider trading has shaped both the evolution of the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and the current state of securities law. The injustice of insider trading, especially as felt by everyday shareholders and investors, mandated action by government regulators. Consequently, the SEC enacted Rule 10b-5—a prohibition and prosecution on any corporate officials’ use of material, non-public information for private profit. In SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co., Rule 10b-5 grew into the sanction on insider trading that it is known as today. As case law whet Rule 10b-5’s reach on in- sider trading, corporate executives became increasingly concerned that necessary business …

Texas Gulf Sulphur And The Genesis Of Corporate Liability Under Rule 10b-5, Adam C. Pritchard, Robert Thompson

SMU Law Review

This Essay explores the seminal role played by SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co. in establishing Rule 10b-5’s use to create a remedy against corporations for misstatements made by their officers. The question of the corporation’s liability for private damages loomed large for the Second Circuit judges in Texas Gulf Sulphur, even though that question was not directly at issue in an SEC action for injunctive relief. The judges considered both, construing narrowly “in connection with the purchase or sale of any security,” and the requisite state of mind required for violating Rule 10b-5. We explore the choices of the …

The Statutory Authority For Court-Ordered Disgorgement In Sec Enforcement Actions, Donna M. Nagy

SMU Law Review

What empowers the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to seek, and federal district courts to order, the disgorgement of ill-gotten gains from securities law violators? The short answer, which stood virtually un- challenged for nearly forty-six years, is that federal courts may award disgorgement, at the request of the SEC, pursuant to the broad equitable powers that Congress conferred in the jurisdictional provisions of the federal securities laws. During the 2017 oral argument in Kokesh v. SEC, however, five Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court interjected statements ex- pressing varying degrees of skepticism. The tenor of the questions during …

A Birthday Toast To Texas Gulf Sulphur, Manning G. Warren Iii

SMU Law Review

This article commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Circuit’s Texas Gulf Sulphur decision by examining the impact of the case on insider trading law in the United States. The author begins by discussing the SEC’s opinion, In the Matter of Cady, Roberts & Co., which laid the foundation for the Texas Gulf Sulphur decision by creating a federal duty to disclose material nonpublic information or abstain from trading securities. The author then posits that the SEC, in its Cady, Roberts decision, rejected judicially developed common law fiduciary duty to disclose based on trust and confidence, and, by administrative fiat, …

Disgorgement In Insider Trading Cases: Fy2005-Fy2015, Verity Winship

SMU Law Review

For about 50 years—at least since Texas Gulf Sulphur—the SEC has ordered defendants to disgorge their profits from transactions that violated the securities laws. Despite disgorgement’s long history, in its 2017 opinion in Kokesh v. SEC, the U.S. Supreme Court put two aspects of the remedy on the table. It applied a five-year statute of limitations to disgorgement. It also reopened old questions about agencies’ power to seek remedies not specified in statute. This article provides data to inform these debates over the agency’s use of disgorgement and the effects of Kokesh. It reports the results of an empirical study …