Preface

• Jurisdiction: United States

Preface

This Handbook had its creation when I began teaching Securities Litigation and Enforcement at Georgetown University Law Center many years ago and had a second birth more recently when I began teaching Securities Regulation at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. But the real genesis of this handbook was in my decades of practicing law. I began my legal career as an Army JAG lawyer in Korea and Washington DC, where I tried and appealed general courts-martial. I then joined the firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, LLP, where I spent the rest of my career as a trial lawyer. As it happened, many of my trials, including jury trials, involved the securities laws. I was fortunate to have tried many securities cases before very good federal judges who knew the law and made certain that I did as well.

As a result, this Handbook is a bit different from a traditional casebook or law textbook. It contains and represents the reflections of a trial lawyer who is, somewhat by happenstance, also a law professor. The question that is presented, time and time again in the classroom and the courtroom, is "what would you do under these circumstances?" As trial lawyers and law students well know, that is an easy question to ask, but a difficult one to answer. I hope that this Handbook will help the readers answer that question whenever it is posed.

The purchase and sale of securities is at the center of our economic system. But for far too long it was unregulated and exploited by unscrupulous robber barons who took advantage of the naïveté of investors to make millions. Prior to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, there were no federal securities laws...