Lucian Bebchuk is William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance and Director of the Program on Corporate Governance, Harvard Law School. Allen Ferrell is Greenfield Professor of Securities Law, Harvard Law School. They are co-authors of Rethinking Basic, a Harvard Law School Discussion Paper forthcoming in the May 2014 issue of The Business Lawyer, that is available here. This post is the first in a three-part series in which they remark on the oral argument at the Halliburton case.
Last week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Halliburton case (transcript available here), which is expected to have a major impact on the future of securities litigation. Encouragingly, there were signs that a number of the Justices might choose to avoid making a judgment on the state of efficient market theory and to focus on the presence of fraudulent distortion (sometimes also referred to as price impact). As we explain in our recent paper, Rethinking Basic, adopting such an approach would be the desirable outcome of this major case both conceptually and practically.
In this first post of a three-part series on the Halliburton oral argument, we comment on prospects of the fraudulent distortion approach in light of what was said at the oral argument. The two subsequent posts will discuss (1) the implementation of such an approach and, in particular, the availability of tools other than events studies for this implementation, and (2) the consistency of the fraudulent distortion approach with not resolving merit issues at the class certification stage. In their briefs, one side of the case argued that the Justices should overrule the Basic ruling in part because of the evidence of market inefficiency that has accumulated over the past twenty five years. The other side, however, urged the Justices to recognize the substantial support that the efficient market hypothesis still has among financial economists.