Das Wertpapierhandelsgesetz (1994–2019): Eine quantitative juristische Studie

When the Securities Trading Act entered into force 25 years ago, securities were already being traded electronically. Nevertheless, the increasing automation of trading is likely one of the main reasons why the Securities Trading Act has been modified so frequently and so deeply in recent years. Initially, it was primarily the matching of buy and sell orders that was automated. Today, it is the orders themselves that are both generated and placed automatically. While lawmakers regularly responded to the increasing automation of trading by amending the Securities Trading Act, this paper takes the opposite route, offering a computer-aided (and in this respect automated) analysis of the changes that the Securities Trading Act has undergone in the past 25 years. The paper is thus an example of quantitative legal studies: the statistical analysis of discrete data to answer legal questions.