In his December 3, 2012, column, “SEC enforcement: What has gone wrong?,” Columbia Law School professor John C. Coffee Jr. makes a series of claims about U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement cases. These claims are inaccurate and paint a distorted picture of an enforcement program that has achieved record results in recent years. As a solution to the problems he sees, Coffee proposes that the SEC outsource its biggest cases to private contingency-fee lawyers a suggestion that ignores critical differences between the SEC’s goals as a regulator and those of a litigant seeking monetary damages.
Coffee casts his solution as a response to the emergence of a “disturbingly persistent pattern” in recent SEC enforcement cases. However, his description of this perceived pattern turns on its head the SEC’s actual record.
