In a 3-2 vote yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved final rules implementing the whistleblower provisions of Section 21F of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

The more law, the greater the injustice

The adopting release is 305 pages long and has 83,917 words, or just about five hundred more words than Nathanial Hawthorne’s 1850 masterpiece novel, The Scarlet Letter (83,421 words). This reminds me of a line from a book that the great Roman lawyer Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote to his son in the last year of his life – De Officiis (On Duties). In Chapter 33, Cicero quotes what was then (43 B.C.) a common proverb, ““Summum ius summa iniuria” or “the more the law, the greater the injustice”.