Proposals for Reform of Securities Regulation: An Overview

In the past few years academic authors such as Roberta Romano, Stephen Choi, Andrew T. Guzman, Merritt B. Fox, Paul Mahoney and Alan R. Palmiter have proposed significant reform of securities regulation in the United States. This article reviews these proposals, which have in common the objective of increasing the range of issuer choice as to the applicable legal regime. This article concludes that although these proposals are not formulated with sufficient specificity to make them ready for implementation, they reflect a spreading disbelief on the part of academic critics that U.S. securities regulation does, or even can, successfully protect investors. Although proposals to give the issuer control over the applicable fraud regime are likely to be controversial, a narrower range of choice focused on the required procedures for offering and trading stocks could provide beneficial competition among regulators. The proposals evidence the fact that there are a significant number of academic writers who hold the view that increasing the opportunities for competition among regulatory regimes in the area of securities regulation would lead to improvements in social welfare over time.