California Corporate & Securities Law

As I have mentioned on numerous occasions, California has its own insider trading statute - California Corporations Code Section 25402. The statute is included in the California Corporate Securities Law of 1968. In general, the jurisdiction of...

Yesterday, I discussed the recent hack of the Securities and Exchange Systems' electronic filing and retrieval system commonly referred to as EDGAR.  In a written statement disclosing the hack, Chairman Jay Clayton speculated that the incident may...

SEC Chairman Jay Clayton launched a sea of news stories last week when he included the following five sentence in a statement on cybersecurity:

I trust that by now most quotidian readers of this blog should be familiar with Corporations Code Section 25402 which declares insider trading to be unlawful. Although the statute has been on the books since the enactment of the Corporate Securities...

Recently, I enjoyed watching My Name is Bill W., a 1989 movie that starred James Woods, JoBeth Williams and James Garner. The film tells the story of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder William Griffith Wilson (aka Bill W.). In telling his story, the...

Insider trading cases remind me of the following joke attributed to stand-up comic Steven Wright:

In 1990, California enacted the California Commodity Law, Stats. 1990, Ch. 969, Corp. Code § 29500 et seq.  Although this law hasn't attracted the attention of legal writers, it has some very sharp teeth, as illustrated by the recent case of People...

A lot of ink has been spilt on the United States Supreme Court's decision in Salman v. United States, 137 S. Ct. 420 (2016). In that case, the Supreme Court upheld the criminal conviction of Mr. Bassam Salman who received lucrative trading tips from...