Three Stories: A Comment on Pritchard & Thompson’s A History of Securities Laws in the Supreme Court

Adam Pritchard and Robert Thompson’s A History of Securities Laws in the Supreme Court should stand for decades as the definitive work on the Federal securities laws’ career in the Supreme Court across the twentieth century.1 Like all good histories, it both tells a story and makes an argument. The story recounts how the Court dealt with the major securities laws, as well the agency charged with enforcing them, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the rules it promulgated, from the 1930s into the twenty-first century. But the book does not just string together a series of events, “one damn thing after another”; it also provides an explanation of why things changed, an account of causes. In this short comment I want to highlight their account, compare it to another account of these events that may (or may not) differ from theirs, and suggest an admittedly unconventional way that readers can test for themselves whether they accept the causal account provided by Pritchard and Thompson.

How to do this? Perhaps by telling stories.