06.16.09
‘Bout Time
Starting October 1, 2009, Michigan will have a new securities act that regulates, among other things, the purchase and sale of stocks. The current act is 45-years-old and therefore doesn’t address many of the landscape-changing developments in securities issues over the past decade or so. The new act will be replaced with the Uniform Securities Act of 2002.
“Uniform acts” are model statutes drafted by a committee of specialist lawyers and professors from across the nation. These legal eggheads address various developments and recent case law, as well as problems that aren’t addressed well by current legislation, then propose a uniform law that all the states can adopt. The goal is to promote greater legal uniformity among the states, as well as to come up with the best legislation possible. One of the earliest uniform acts was the Uniform Commercial Code, which has been pretty popular (so much so that most lay people are acquainted with the phrase “UCC”). The Uniform Securities Act is another model statute in the tradition of the uniform codes.
