> I wrote about it back in 2015, when it was proposed, and it hasn’t changed materially in the four and a half years between then and when it was passed by the House yesterday. What I said then was that this bill is more or less an effort to codify existing insider trading law: “It just keeps as much of current law as possible consistent with throwing out the controversial Newman conclusion,” I wrote, and since then the court decision in U.S. v. Newman has been pretty much reversed anyway, which means that this mostly keeps the law the same as it currently is.
> Now some people think that current U.S. insider trading law is too strict, and lots of other people think that it is too lenient, and if you think either of those things then you will probably have objections to this bill. In particular, many many many many people think that U.S. law should have a “parity of information” standard in which anyone who has material nonpublic information, no matter how they obtained it, should not be allowed to trade. If you want a parity-of-information standard, you will be disappointed in this bill, which maintains the current U.S. rule that trading on material nonpublic information is only illegal if “such information has been obtained wrongfully.” “Wrongfully” includes getting information by theft, bribery, computer hacking, or through “a breach of any fiduciary duty, a breach of a confidentiality agreement, a breach of contract, or a breach of any other personal or other relationship of trust and confidence.”
> [...]
> The real point here is:
> 1. the current law is what it is, but
> 2. it is uncertain and shifting and judge-made and not written down in any one place, so
> 3. just writing it down is an improvement.