Loss, Louis

Loss, Louis (1914–  ) legal scholar; born in Lancaster, Pa. Son of Russian immigrants, he decided early to become a lawyer, and after majoring in pre-law at the University of Pennsylvania (1934), he went to Yale Law School. On graduation (1937), he joined the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in Washington, D.C., and gradually became the authority on the laws and regulations pertaining to securities. After teaching securities law part time at the law schools of Yale and George Washington University, he joined the faculty of Harvard Law School in 1952, resigning from the SEC later that year. He published the one-volume Securities Regulation (1941), thereby coining that very term as well as laying the intellectual foundations of the legal discipline, and then coauthored (with Joel Seligman) its 11-volume update, Securities Regulation (1993), the definitive treatise on the subject. Through his courses and writings on securities law, he trained generations of American lawyers and judges in this subject. His 700-page codification of all American securities laws, regulations, and court decisions only awaits passage by Congress to introduce some standards and simplification into this otherwise confused and confusing field.