Fictitious Fraud: Economics and the Presumption of Reliance

International Journal of Law in Context 9(4) (Forthcoming)

27 Pages Posted: 3 Dec 2013

See all articles by Randy Gordon

Randy Gordon

Texas A&M University School of Law; Duane Morris LLP

Date Written: December 2, 2013

Abstract

In the popular imagination, legal proceedings and their rules of law are thought of as paths to unalloyed truth. Both practitioners and scholars know this is often not the case because the law is, as are other domains, riddled with fictions. Indeed, the law sometimes borrows fictions from other domains to help it achieve results that would otherwise be unobtainable. One such place is securities law, in which courts in the United States have borrowed the concept of the “efficient market” from economics to make fraud class actions possible. But that concept is — if not wholly — at least in good measure fictional.

Keywords: securities fraud, legal fictions, Basic Inc., presumption of reliance, efficient market, hypothesis, economics, legal theory

Suggested Citation

Gordon, Randy, Fictitious Fraud: Economics and the Presumption of Reliance (December 2, 2013). International Journal of Law in Context 9(4) (Forthcoming), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2362527

Randy Gordon (Contact Author)

Texas A&M University School of Law ( email )

1515 Commerce St.
Fort Worth, TX Tarrant County 76102
United States
817-212-3941 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://law.tamu.edu/faculty-staff/find-people/faculty-profiles/randy-d-gordon

Duane Morris LLP ( email )

United States

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