In this post, Professor Stephen Bainbridge takes the Securities and Exchange Commission to task for investigating Activision's employment practices:
To be sure, the SEC (and plaintiff securities lawyers) have sometimes tried to use disclosure claims to regulate substantive behavior. Apparently, that's the wedge the SEC is relying on here to insert itself into Activision's employment practices. But such efforts are contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the securities laws.
As a former NFL rushing star once enjoined nearly a half century ago:
We thus adhere to the the position that "Congress by § 10(b) did not seek to regulate transactions which constitute no more than internal corporate mismanagement".
Santa Fe Industries, Inc. v. Green, 430 U.S. 462 (1977).
About those epithets . . .
On an entirely unrelated note, I just finished reading Hearing Homer's Song by Robert Kanigel. The book tells the story of Milman Parry who revolutionized the way scholars think about how the Iliad and Odyssey came to be. To substantiate his theory that Homer (or Homers) composed these epics orally, Milman traveled to Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II to record thousands of disks of illiterate singers of songs. I was interested in the book because decades later I took a memorable class in early and oral literature from Milman's young protege - Albert Lord. Professor Lord was an inspiring teacher and class was all the more impressive because it was held in Harvard's magnificent Sanders Theater (where I also once watched Mstislav Rostropovich give a masters class to YoYo Ma). Kanigel's book inspired me to purchase The Wedding of Smailagic Meho by Avdo Mededovic and translated by Professor Lord. Avdo, a butcher, could neither read nor write, but he could sing thousands of lines of poetry from memory. According to Kanigel, "This was the song of all those in Avdo's repertoire, and of all those Parry heard in Yugoslavia, that came closes to validating, at one stroke, Parry's claims for the roots of the Odyssey and the Iliad".
