Scholarship@WashULaw

Document Type

Article

Language

English (en)

Publication Date

2009

Publication Title

Virginia Law Review

Abstract

In Jack Coffee and Hillary Sale’s article, Redesigning the SEC: Does the Treasury Have a Better Idea?, the authors address the dominant reality today—that “[t]he natural superiority of the U.S. model for securities regulation is no longer an article of faith” and analyze whether the Department of the Treasury Blueprint provides a wiser structure of financial regulation.

Jim Cox in Coping in a Global Marketplace: Survival Strategies for a 75-Year-Old SEC similarly begins, “data bear witness to the fact that government agencies come and go,” but highlights the complexities of creating an international approach to accounting standards.

Judge Easterbrook begins his essay with uncharacteristic insouciance: My association with the SEC goes way back. In the 1970s, when I was in the Solicitor General’s Office, I helped them lose some prominent cases, including Blue Chip Stamps and Chiarella; I’m sure that the SEC could have lost them without me, but it was fun to have participated.

But Judge Easterbrook also shares the prevailing uncertain mood: “I assume that there will be a 100th Anniversary conference in 2034, and I’m looking forward to that one too. (Even if the SEC is abolished, as the Treasury has proposed . . . .)”

Donald Langevoort warns in The SEC, Retail Investors, and the Institutionalization of the Securities Markets that the Commission— founded in part on the concept of protecting the retail investor— has become increasingly irrelevant as “[t]he last thirty years or so have brought a rapid shift toward institutionalization in the financial markets in the United States.”

Even Adam Pritchard and Bob Thompson’s insightful history, Securities Law and the New Deal Justices, brings little relief from the sense of fin de siècle. The world they describe, in which the Commission’s interpretations of statutes such as the former Public Utility Holding Company Act were almost invariably judicially upheld, is now a world long past.

Keywords

SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission 75th Anniversary, Symposium

Publication Citation

Joel Seligman, The SEC in a Time of Discontinuity, 95 Va. L. Rev. 667 (2009)

Download

Share

COinS