This short piece is an annotated version of remarks that I gave to introduce a roundtable discussion on securities regulation scholarship at the University of Maryland School of Law program on “Corporate Governance and Securities Law Responses to the Financial Crisis” held on April 17, 2009....

This paper develops the building blocks for a legal theory of finance. LTF holds that financial markets are legally constructed and as such occupy an essentially hybrid place between state and market, public and private. At the same time, financial markets exhibit dynamics that frequently put...