Ben Edwards

What is the most significant issue facing your field and how should it be addressed?

Retirement security remains one of the biggest issues facing America. The median person over 65 only has around $58,000 in retirement account savings. With access to traditional defined-benefit pensions declining, many Americans just won’t have enough in retirement. We’re beginning to see this problem grow with more and more seniors becoming food insecure each year. Social Security payments are often just not enough.

Much of my work focuses on a facet of this problem—how can we make sure that people get good advice? The federal Securities and Exchange Commission recently released new regulations — including one called regulation best interest. It has been hyped as requiring stockbrokers to give clients advice in their best interest. In my view, the new regulations do not go nearly far enough and leave the public exposed to the same kinds of conflicts we have today. If you’re interested in learning more, I spoke with the Knowledge @ Wharton radio program about the new rules when they came out. Since then, seven states have sued on the theory that the SEC did not go far enough in its rulemaking and did not deliver the kind of rule Congress called for when it authorized the rulemaking in Dodd-Frank. It remains an exciting area to watch.

Have you had any interesting recent developments in the Investor Protection Law Clinic?

We do have some news to report to Boyd Nation. I’m so thrilled that a plucky band of Boyd Law students took on Wells Fargo in an arbitration proceeding and won. The Wall Street Journal covered our victory. It’s significant not just for the law student success but also because it may be the first successful arbitration claim where the claimant brought a claim under Nevada’s first-in-the-nation fiduciary statute. In essence, we appear to have won the first case including a claim in Nevada’s new law requiring financial advisers to act in their client’s best interests. 

What else has been happening?

If you’re interested in more scholarship, Stanford’s Business Law Podcast recently featured a piece I co-authored on conflicts in securities class action settlements. You can listen to it here.