Loss, Louis (1914–1997)

US legal scholar. He published the one-volume Securities Regulation (1941), thereby coining the term as well as laying the intellectual foundations of the legal discipline. He then coauthored, with Joel Seligman, the 11-volume update, Securities Regulation (1993), the definitive treatise on the subject. Through his courses and writings on securities law, he trained generations of US lawyers and judges in this subject.

The son of Russian immigrants, Loss was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He majored in pre-law at the University of Pennsylvania (1934), and then studied at Yale Law School, graduating in 1937. He joined the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in Washington, DC, 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 universities, he joined the faculty of Harvard Law School in 1952, resigning from the SEC later that year.