The rise of index funds has reshaped the modern American capital markets. Like mutual fund managers, indices now direct trillions of dollars of investor capital. Although it regulates mutual fund managers as investment advisers, the SEC has chosen not to treat the providers of market indices similarly. In this Article, we argue that many index providers are not merely like investment advisers; under the relevant statutory and regulatory regimes, they are investment advisers. The SEC’s failure to recognize this fact reflects an inaccurate and antiquated view of the index fund market. Having established that certain index providers are presently acting as unregulated investment advisers, we propose a regulatory solution. The SEC should create a nonexclusive, conditional safe harbor giving index providers guidance on what activities will and will not make them investment advisers. This would close the regulatory gap in a way that is consistent with the governing statutes and case law without unduly burdening market participants.
Academic and market interest in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing has grown markedly in recent years. Although less prominent, a...
In this chapter, we put forth a case study of Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. We detail the legal and contractual issues that arose as the parties...
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Although research suggests that countries' colonial experiences are associated with a range of contemporary outcomes, the link between colonial...
Critics of initiatives to diversify corporate boards frequently rely on efficiency arguments. Diversity opponents marshal four principal claims. First...
The number of law firm partners who identify as women has more than doubled since 1993. Will these gender parity advances regress as employers curb...
Citation rankings have emerged as a popular approach to ranking the scholarly impact of law faculties. This paper develops a statistical approach for...
Annotation and classification of legal text are central components of empirical legal research. Traditionally, these tasks are often delegated to...
As our nation emerges from the shadow of COVID-19, the general public is coming to grips with a stark reality looming over our public schools...
Large language models (LLMs) now perform extremely well on many natural language processing tasks. Their ability to convert legal texts to data may...
In Cantero v. Bank of America, the US Supreme Court declined to decide whether Bank of America Corp. must pay interest on New York mortgage borrowers’...
Twenty-first-century politics has inspired a new mode of interstate rivalries and reprisals consisting not of the tariffs that plagued the Founding...
Anyone who studies trade secret law in depth knows that the field is complex and nuanced. That complexity can be intimidating to novices. Accordingly...
Anyone who studies patent law in depth knows that the field is complex and nuanced. That complexity can be intimidating to novices. Accordingly, the...
There have been many many, many proposals to use Russia’s frozen assets to help Ukraine. Russia’s invasion violated international law; reparations are...
These are momentous times for the comparative analysis of judicial behaviour. Once the sole province of US political scientists, a new generation of...
After several years of dramatic growth, ESG investing seems to have entered a period of retrenchment. While it is impossible to predict the future...
This chapter provides an overview of computational text analysis techniques used to study judicial behavior and decision-making. As legal texts become...