The first is Oran v. Stafford, 226 F.3d 275 (2000). Oran is a gem of a case. Except for the facts, which are tedious.

In Oran, Judge Alito once again focused on market impact as a bright-line rule to measure materiality.

In Burlington . . . this Court fashioned a special rule for measuring materiality in the context of an efficient securities market. This rule was shaped by the basic economic insight that in an open and developed securities market like the New York Stock Exchange, the price of a company's stock is determined by all available material information regarding the company and its business. In such an efficient market, "information important to reasonable investors ... is immediately incorporated into the stock price." Burlington, 114 F.3d at 1425. As a result, when a stock is traded in an efficient market, the materiality of disclosed information may be measured post hoc by looking to the movement, in the period immediately following disclosure, of the price of the firm's stock.

As I explained previously, I think there are some problems with this approach (even though I seem to support it at places here.) Nevertheless, Judge Alito's strong reaffirmation of the ECMH in 2000 suggests that he may be quite resistant to attacks on the construct using behavioral research, which, in the end, may result in decisions that securities plaintiffs like much more than securities defendants. For example, Alito in Oran found that evidence of price movement (even without a loss causation analysis) meant that a disclosure was material, per se. In a paper analyzing around 500 securities cases from the Second Circuit, I found only a handful of judges willing to find materiality as a matter of law as a result of price movement. It is a testament to Judge Alito's intellectual honesty that he was willing to do so in this case.

An earlier decision, In re Westinghouse Securities Litigation, 90 F.3d 696 (1996) provides a look at the Judge's view of the (very troublesome) bespeaks caution doctrine. The bespeaks caution doctrine, for those of you who are not professionally enthralled by securities law, holds that where a company’s allegedly misleading predictions are paired with specific cautionary warnings about the fallibility of the corporation's oracular abilities, and the ways in which the future might go badly, there can be no liability. The bespeaks caution doctrine is an increasingly popular way that judges dismiss securities claims early in litigations, removing such cases from judicial dockets before the costly (and truth-uncovering) discovery stage.

Judge Alito was surprisingly hostile to the BC doctrine in Westinghouse. Although the defendants had made many cautionary statements, Alito found that they were not targeted at the representation at issue - - that the defendant knowingly misrepresented their financial state. That is, defendants' statements about the potentially grim future would not protect their lies about their present condition.

A reasonable investor might well be willing to take some chances with regard to the future of the economy, but might be quite unwilling to invest in a company that knew that its reserves were insufficient under current conditions and knew it would be taking another major write-down in the near future (as plaintiffs allege). Thus, notwithstanding the cautionary language stressed by defendants, we think that there is a substantial likelihood that defendants' alleged misrepresentations . . . would have assumed actual significance to a reasonable investor contemplating the purchase of securities.

Sounds uncontroversial. But as I have found in my research, judges have been willing to apply the BC doctrine with abandon in recent years, and Judge Alito's decision reversing the district court on this issue suggests that he is not reflexively in favor of deregulating the securities markets, as some of his partisans might hope.