SOX: The Scholarly Second-Guessing Begins

Roberta Romano has just published an article in the Yale Law Review (an abstract or summary of the article is found at http://www.yalelawjournal.org/abstract.asp?id=465) which calls Sarbanes-Oxley "quack corporate governance" with "mismatched means and ends" which ignored accounting and finance literature which provided metrics which could measure the effectiveness of the legislation. Romano calls for corporate governance provisions to be made optional rather than mandatory and for future legislation to essentially provide a "cooling off" period where the initial law could be deliberated more carefully after the crisis had passed.