Adventures in the Fourth Branch of Government
Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court Justice and the lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, once said that the rise of administrative agencies had been the last century’s “most significant legal trend,” they had “become a veritable fourth branch of the Government, which has deranged our three-branch legal theories much as the concept of a fourth dimension unsettles our three-dimensional thinking.”1 That was in 1952, and Justice Jackson was talking about the takeover o
High Speed Trading Redux
It’s now been about a year since the furor following publication of Michael Lewis’s book Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt died down, and we thought we’d examine what happened in the interim to address the issues raised — particularly the willingness of securities exchanges to deliver information faster to those who pay for the right and to provide high speed traders with order types that allow them to jump in front of those who are slower. The answer is not that much. We thou