Book Review

Stuart Banner's Anglo-American Securities Regulation provides a well-written, informative, and entertaining treatment of a complex subject. Banner draws on a range of sources, including poetry, fiction, and contemporary political and economic discourse, to describe how people thought about trading in stocks and bonds and how such trading was regulated. He begins with the South Sea Bubble and remains in England through the eighteenth century, shifting to the United States in the late colonial period. His analysis of the historical origins of contemporary securities regulation convincingly demonstrates that the choices made by late-seventeenth-century Englishmen and late-eighteenth-century Americans have framed subsequent debate over what constitutes wise or reasonable securities regulation.

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Banner uses this study of the evolution of securities law to argue that the debate over whether legal changes reflect external social and economic forces or internal professional logic is misdirected. Internal and external forces interact. Preexisting law shaped the response to the South Sea Bubble. But powerful economic forces also shaped the laws that were enacted and their enforcement. In periods of relative stability, Banner argues, laws evolve largely as a result of forces internal to the legal establishment and to the law itself. But during periods of economic and social change, external forces shape law and the parameters within which internal forces will operate in the future.

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