The Leidos Mixup and the Misunderstood Duty to Disclose in Securities Law

Abstract

This Article concerns the recent Supreme Court case, Leidos, Inc. v. Indiana Public Retirement System (Leidos), and examines the broader issues that it raised for securities law. The consensus among scholars and practitioners is that Leidos presented a direct conflict among the circuit courts over a core question of securities law-when a failure to comply with the SEC's disclosure requirements can constitute fraud under Rule 10b-5. This Article provides a much different interpretation of the case. It begins by demonstrating that the circuit split which is presumed to have brought Leidos to the Supreme Court does not in fact exist. It then shows that, rather than being riddled with disagreement, the leading judicial analysis in this area of the law instead reflects a shared set of misconceptions about how the securities regulation architecture works. By unraveling the underlying sources of the Leidos mix-up, this Article makes three contributions. First, it identifies overlooked aspects of the disclosure rules at issue in Leidos, and provides a novel analysis of how the case should have been decided. Second, it explains how errors in leading interpretations of the legal authorities implicated in Leidos carry over to other prominent portions of the regulatory framework, namely Sections 11 and 12 of the 1933 Securities Act. Third, it demonstrates that a central yet