When energy giant Enron crumbled in 2001, evaporating the life savings of thousands of investors and employees, it was clear that heads would roll. Not just Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling paid the price: Congress first threw a yolk over the entire corporate world with the far-reaching Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which established new standards for governance of public companies. But according to Penn Law Professor Michael Wachter, the true culprit was not corporate malfeasance so much as a corpulent market.

“Sure, there were nasty capitalists who wanted to make a lot of money, but I think that what made it a perfect storm was the great market bubble of 2000,” Wachter said at the annual alumni reunion’s Classes Without Quizzes CLE Panel Discussion last May. “In American history, we regularly have periods of great economic growth, excesses build up and get overheated, and I think that’s what we’re looking at here.”