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A Prolonged Slump for ‘Plaintiff-Pitchers’: The Narrow ‘Strike Zone’ for Securities Plaintiffs in the Fourth Circuit
Abstract
This article focuses on the narrow “strike zone” that plaintiffs must overcome in private securities actions instituted in the Fourth Circuit. Based on empirical data generated over a fourteen-year span, there emerges a clear finding that during that time period defendants were victorious in almost all cases, either on the merits of the case or due to procedural obstacles. The authors posit that this pattern of difficulty for plaintiffs arises, at least in part, from the Fourth Circuit’s restrictive interpretation of various requisite elements of these causes of action, such as materiality and scienter, as well as the Fourth Circuit’s approach to the pleading standards mandated by the PSLRA and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The authors examine in detail some of the leading securities cases that establish Fourth Circuit precedent in these areas, as well as notable cases from the survey period, to illustrate the confines of the narrow “strike zone” available to plaintiffs to establish a meritorious claim.
This article explores the relationship between the proposed Uniform Computer Information Act (UCITA) and copyright law, focusing on flaws in the respective legislative processes. UCITA's transactional framework conflicts with traditional copyright rules and policies, but accords with recent paracopyright laws like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act which favor the interests of information providers over those of information users. While some commentators have suggested that traditional copyright law may serve as a consumer protection statute overriding onerous information licensing practices, copyright is not well-suited to such a task since it is subject to the same interest group pressures that produced UCITA. The article applies basic principles of interest group theory to the legislative processes producing copyright law and uniform laws and suggests that the drafting processes for both sets of laws should be reformed to provide better representation for public interest groups, particularly those representing consumers. Moreover, the two processes ought to be coordinated to produce a coherent national information policy that can be consistently implemented through contractual default rules governing particular transactions. Such reform might help future proposals avoid the controversy which has brought UCITA to a halt in state legislatures.