Louis Loss

Louis Loss (June 11, 1914 – December 13, 1997) was an American legal scholar. He was considered to be the intellectual father of modern securities law. He served as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School. He is best known for his treatise Securities Regulation, which is still considered to be the definitive authority on the subject and which has been cited over 50 times by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Education and SEC career Loss graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in 1934 and Yale Law School with his LL.B. in 1937. He was also granted an honorary A.M. from Harvard University in 1953. Upon his graduation from Yale, Loss joined the Securities and Exchange Commission, where he served as staff attorney from 1937 to 1944, chief counsel of the Division of Trading and Exchanges from 1944 to 1948, and associate general counsel from 1948 to 1952. While at the SEC, he helped develop the initial theories that enabled the Securities and Exchange Commission to use the broadly worded anti-fraud provisions of the securities law to prosecute insider trading, an area not directly addressed by the law itself. Loss' wife, Bernice, served as Curator of the Harvard Law School art collection, which includes dozens of paintings of English and American jurists.