The New York Times’ Joseph Nocera has written a couple of real doozy op-eds recently, one extolling the “lofty standards” of New York AG Eliot Spitzer and another one defending the virtues of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the latter of which contained a quote or two from UCLA law professor and well-known corporate law blogger, Stephen Bainbridge.
In this Tech Central Station op-ed, Professor Bainbridge dissects Nocera’s argument in favor of SOX and exposes the legislation for what it is — a knee-jerk legislative reaction to a brief spike in corporate accounting scandals that arose after the bursting of the late 1990’s stock market bubble. As Bainbridge lucidly points out, SOX neither makes such scandals less likely to occur nor improves the functioning of public-equity financing markets.
Advantage Bainbridge.

This earlier post noted that Lea Fastow — a former mid-level Enron executive and wife of demonized former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow — was prosecuted more harshly than normal for tax fraud because of her relationship to Fastow and endured longer and harsher punishment because of it. Earlier posts on the Lea Fastow case are here.
The Chronicle’s Mary Flood reports here that Mr. Fastow apparently agrees with me. He has sworn that neither Mrs. Fastow nor he were involved in tax fraud at all. Of course, as Peter Henning points out, Mr. Fastow’s sworn statements raise all sorts of interesting questions.
One of the most interesting questions is for the Enron Task Force — despite his guilty plea to various crimes under a plea bargain, does Mr. Fastow truly believe that he committed crimes at Enron? It would be a good idea for the Task Force prosecutors to pin Fastow down on that little detail before he takes the stand in the upcoming trial of former key Enron executives Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Richard Causey.