Home > Journals > St. John's Law Review > Vol. 99 > No. 4
Document Type
Symposium
Abstract
(Excerpt)
Thank you, Judge Lohier, thank you Professor Subotnik, and thank you to everyone who put this scholarship symposium together. I am acutely aware that I am the last panelist, on the last panel, on Friday afternoon, and so, I am going to try my best to keep my comments to the allotted ten minutes.
It is important to keep two key points in mind if we are going to talk about the Roberts Court’s approach to private securities enforcement. First, the Roberts Court contains no securities experts. In fact, except for Lewis F. Powell Jr. and William O. Douglas, none of the justices who have ever sat on the Supreme Court have had any real experience with, or expertise in, securities regulation. Justice Douglas was the second chairman of the SEC, and before that he was a corporate and bankruptcy professor at Yale and Columbia. Lewis Powell was the only practicing securities lawyer to ever serve on the Court (President Dwight D. Eisenhower had even offered him the SEC chairmanship in 1953). For the remainder of the justices, securities regulation was, and no doubt remains, an esoteric subject.
Second, and I think I am on comfortable ground here, besides those two, none of the justices have ever demonstrated a burning interest in the nuances of securities regulation. So, let’s do a little thought experiment. I want you to close your eyes and picture your favorite Supreme Court justice. They just got word that they have been confirmed by the Senate. Can you imagine them smiling, clapping their hands together, and saying: “Now I can reshape securities regulation.”