Welcome to Truth on the Market. We have launched this blog to provide the metaphysical subjective truth on abstract, concrete and invisible markets throughout the civilized world (whatever that means). More specifically, as indicated by our current tagline (we know it’s unoriginal; we hope to come up with something better soon) our blog will provide academic commentary on law, business, economics and more. The “more” will include observations on law school, blogging, being a law prof, smoking bans, payola, legal valuation, football, processed cheese, and calorie counts, among other things.
We currently have a lineup of six young turks as regular bloggers and may add more. We all teach and write in the business law area, broadly defined. We had hoped to have some non-law profs (economics, finance, IO, sociology, etc.) and business law practitioners, but our recruitment efforts have so far been unsuccessful. Note though that Josh has a Ph.D. in economics. We also have an anonymous blogger, “pseudonym on the marketâ€? (he/she is rumored to be the love child of Article III Groupie and Jaun Non-Volokh). Unfortunately, contrary to rumors, neither Henry Manne nor Kate Litvak will be joining us out of the chute, but we’re hoping one or both will join us in the near future for at least a guest stint.
We are aware of recent statements that blogging should be avoided by junior faculty. We are all junior faculty here and thus obviously disagree. Or, more correctly, as elaborated by Prof. Barnett in this post, we applied our local knowledge of our faculties and personal knowledge of ourselves and determined that the benefits of blogging outweigh the risks (other than Pseudonym on the Market who does think it is too risky, hence the pseudonym).
If all goes well with this blog, look for the Truth on the Market hedge fund. If not, maybe we can get jobs at Tufts (does Tufts have a law school?).
Finally, we look forward to Dave Hoffman of Concurring Opinions disagreeing with us often.
Note that the phrase “truth on the market” is a term of art under federal securities laws, although we’re not using it here in that sense, at least not exclusively. See below the fold for the securities law meaning.
The phrase “truth on the market� relates to Rule 10b-5 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Rule 10b-5 prohibits fraud in connection with the purchase or sale of a security. To prevail on a Rule 10b-5 claim, a plaintiff must prove, among other things, reliance on a material misstatement or omission. One way to meet this reliance element is through the “fraud on the market� theory. Under the theory, it is presumed that the plaintiff relied on the misstatement or omission by relying on the integrity of the stock price established by the market. The defendant, however, can rebut this presumption through the “truth on the market� defense. To establish it, the defendant must prove that notwithstanding its misrepresentation or omission, the stock price reflected the correct information because the information entered the market through other channels, i.e., the truth was on the market.
