Origin of the Blue Sky Laws

For more than a generation-between 1911 and 1933-securities sales in the United States were regulated nearly exclusively by specialized state statutes known colloquially as blue sky laws. Only with the Securities Act of 1933, adopted by Congress at a time of national economic collapse, did federal regulation begin to any significant extent. And even then federal law was little more than a pastiche of prior experiments in blue sky regulation. Because the Securities Act of 1933 expressly preserved the jurisdiction of state securities commissions, blue sky regulation remained-and remains today-a significant part of securities law practice