Course

Securities & Financial Services Regulation - JURD7541

Faculty: Faculty of Law

School: Faculty of Law

Course Outline: See below

Campus: Sydney

Career: Postgraduate

Units of Credit: 6

EFTSL: 0.12500 (more info)

Indicative Contact Hours per Week: 3

Enrolment Requirements:

Pre-req: Business Associations (LAWS1091/JURD7224), Crime & the Criminal Process (LAWS1021/JURD7121), Torts (LAWS1061/JURD7161) and Administratve Law (LAWS1160/JURD7160) OR BA1 (LAWS2010/JURD7224), Crim 1 (LAWS1001/JURD7101), Torts, and Admin. Law.

Excluded: LAWS3141

CSS Contribution Charge: 3 (more info)

Tuition Fee: See Tuition Fee Schedule

Further Information: See Class Timetable

View course information for previous years.

Description

The course considers the main techniques of financial regulation: disclosure, licensing, prohibitions of market misconduct, self regulation and powers of investigation and enforcement. It considers the rules and practices constituting financial regulation, the market institutions and regulatory context in which it operates and the additional insights we gain from contemporary regulatory studies. The course tackles current issues in financial regulation such as the impact on law of product and market convergence, intermediary conglomeration, globalization, use of computer and telecommunications and responses to recent ethical failures in financial services.


Recommended Prior Knowledge

None

Course Objectives

1. To study the regulation of securities and financial products and markets by considering the institutions and context in which the markets operate.

2. To understand the policy reasons for regulation, the main regulatory techniques adopted (e.g. disclosure, licensing, powers of investigation and enforcement) and the issues of law and policy raised by the approaches adopted; to appreciate the strengths and limits of particular legal rules and associated practices used in financial regulation.

3. To enrich the study of relevant regulatory rules and policy by the introduction of inter-disciplinary material eg from financial economics the contribution of the efficient markets hypothesis to the regulation of disclosure; from sociology of law literature on styles of regulation and enforcement.

4. To acquire facility with the complex statutory materials and policy which govern financial markets and experience in treating the regulation as primarily a system of statutory and administrative rules as much as judge-made law.

Main Topics

  • Institutions and sources of Australian financial regulation;
  • The nature and effect of regulation and the main theoretical perspectives on regulation;
  • What are we regulating: financial products, financial markets and financial services;
  • Prospectus and retail disclosure;
  • Licensing of financial markets and intermediaries;
  • Customer agreements: traditional advisory and with online brokers;
  • Market manipulation;
  • Regulator's remedies: criminal, civil penalties and enforceable undertakings;
  • Plaintiff's remedies: curial actions, industry based dispute resolution;
  • Financial regulation in future.

Assessment

Market visit report - 10%
Class participation - 10%
Compulsory research essay question - 40%
Open book exam - 40%

Course Texts

Prescribed

  • Corporations Act 2001, 2006 edition.
  • Baxt R, Black A, Hanrahan P, Securities and Financial Services Law (Butterworths, 2003).
  • Collection of reading materials for this course.

Recommended
Refer to Course Outline provided by lecturer.

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