Sky Blog
Securities class-action lawsuits play a crucial role in holding corporations accountable for financial misdeeds. They typically involve allegations of securities fraud, where a company makes misleading statements or omits important information that leads to an inflated stock price. When the …
Fraud-on-the-market (“FOTM”) suits are thought to generate considerable benefits for society – namely, those associated with increased stock-market price accuracy and liquidity. But these suits are also said to impose exceptionally large social costs relative to even those associated with …
Class-action litigation for fraud on the market typically focuses on purchasers and sellers of stock. Yet those that traded in options on the shares can also be harmed. In a recent paper, we draw from experience in In re Apple, …
Fraud-on-the-market (“FOTM”) suits are thought to generate considerable benefits for society – namely, those associated with increased stock-market liquidity and price accuracy. But these suits are also said to impose outsized costs. The federal courts have thus long tried to …
Investors now routinely turn to crypto asset trading for portfolio appreciation and diversification, but significant investor protection concerns loom. Between 2017 and 2019, thousands of crypto assets were offered to the public and others through initial coin offerings. Many of …
The class action is indispensable to private enforcement of SEC Rule 10b-5, which prohibits fraudulent practices in the secondary securities market. Though Rule 10b-5 is a criminal provision, courts have long inferred a private civil right of action, allowing defrauded …
Securities fraud and short sellers are strange bedfellows. The stereotypical story involving both happens when short sellers bring to light false statements of issuers, prompting corrective disclosures and giving shareholders a cause of action. At times, issuers accuse these short …
Private Rule 10b-5 lawsuits have inspired volumes of academic literature, much of it focused on the suits’ social benefits (or lack thereof, depending on the author’s perspective). In a chapter for the forthcoming Research Handbook on Representative Shareholder Litigation, I …
To be a public company in the United States is to be subject to an array of federally-imposed disclosure requirements. In my forthcoming article, Reviving Reliance, I describe how the private causes of action available to enforce these requirements …
On September 27, 2016, in related appeals arising from a long-pending securities fraud class action against Vivendi, the Second Circuit ruled on several important issues, including the proof necessary to both sustain and defeat the fraud-on-the-market presumption of reliance.
Most …
On July 25, 2015, Judge Barbara Lynn of the Northern District of Texas issued a formative opinion in the class actions securities arena. The case, The Erica P. John Fund, Inc., et al. v. Halliburton Co., et al., No. …
The following post comes to us from Wendy Gerwick Couture, Associate Professor at the University of Idaho College of Law. It is based on her recent paper entitled “Answering Halliburton II’s Unanswered Question: Burdens of Production and Persuasion on Price …