Implications for Market Efficiency and Damages Analysis of Plaintiff Interpretations of Halliburton II's Statement that "market efficiency is a matter of degree"

Authors

David Tabak, NERA Economic Consulting

Abstract

On June 23, 2014, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc. (“Halliburton II”) that prior case law “affords defendants an opportunity to rebut the presumption by showing, among other things, that the particular misrepresentation at issue did not affect the stock’s market price.”1 While this has generally been considered the key holding, it has not gone unnoticed that the Court affirmed its prior ruling in Basic, Inc. v. Levinson,2 mentioning that the “presumption of reliance thus does not rest on a ‘binary’ view of market efficiency”3 and, referring to the Brief for Petitioners, that the “markets for some securities are more efficient than the markets for others.”4 In this Article, I discuss the implications for a securities fraud case of the proposition, apparently advanced by the plaintiffs’ bar, that there is something new to be found in arguing that the security in question in a securities litigation is “less efficient” than typical.

First Page

467

Recommended Citation

David Tabak, Implications for Market Efficiency and Damages Analysis of Plaintiff Interpretations of Halliburton II's Statement that "market efficiency is a matter of degree", 46 Loy. U. Chi. L. J. 467 (2015).
Available at: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol46/iss3/5