Missing the Role of Property in the Regulation of Insider Trading

Most scholars have missed the role of property in the U.S. regulation of insider trading. Decades of scholarship have grappled with whether future iterations of the regulation would be improved by treating insider trading as a property issue.1 Some scholarship relies on economic analysis aimed at determining which allocation of rights in information will generate the greatest efficiency or liquidity in U.S. securities markets. Other scholarship attempts to reconcile the perceived incoherence or vagueness in the law using doctrinal analysis. However, almost everyone seems to miss the fact that under the classical theory officials have consistently predicated legal liability, in part, on the violation of the property rights of the information owner and have explicitly recognized the issuing corporation as the owner of the information