Benjamin Edwards’ Finance Scholarship Pieces Impact Current Legal Cases

Professor Benjamin Edwards has written a significant amount about financial self-regulatory organizations. Although these quasi-governmental entities play critical roles in overseeing and running our financial system, ordinary civics classes never touch on them.  In 2022, he published Supreme Risk, a close look at how resurgent legal doctrines under post-Trump era Supreme Court now create real risk for self-regulatory organizations and our financial system.

Professor Edwards explains that "there is a real risk that the current Supreme Court may end up interfering with the financial self-regulatory organizations, which might cause a financial crisis or other major problems in the financial industry." After he published the article, multiple cases challenging the regulatory structure were filed. In one, the plaintiffs cited Supreme Risk in their opening appellate brief in the D.C. circuit. Professor Edwards's work was also cited by other amicus briefs in the same case; he believes that there is a good chance that the issue may show up in front of the Supreme Court. 

He also recently co-authored Stockbroker Secrets with James Fallows Tierney, which looks at the process FINRA uses to purge negative information about stockbrokers from the public record. This paper argues that using an arbitration process instead of a regulatory process is a mistake.  While a regulatory process will cost more to administer, it will have fewer mistakes and be better for the public. Professor Edwards has also had multiple op/eds published recently in The Daily Beast, Financial Planning, and The Hill. He has also previously published op/eds in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and elsewhere.  Lastly, he is now working on another piece tentatively entitled Fiduciary Fraud Fighting, which will tackle the challenging problems in fiduciary liability and third-party fraud.