had been victimized by its unscrupulous employee. As to claims under the Securities Exchange Act, the Act's legislative history, under which the House of Representatives version was adopted, indicates that respondeat superior is not applicable because liability is allowed only if there was participation in the employee's fraud. Furthermore, courts such as the Southern District of New York have held that respondeat superior liability is not available under Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act. Similarly, Thomas Hazen wrote in Treatise on the Law of Securities Regulation (2005), "Respondeat superior... do[es] not apply to sanctions for illegal trading on inside information." As Robert Anello wrote in Forbes in 2014, "Analysis of the corporate mens rea is, by definition, contrived and one with which federal courts have struggled." In the US, there is a three-way circuit split, as the Fifth Circuit and the Eleventh Circuit apply respondeat superior, the Second Circuit and the Seventh Circuit and the Ninth Circuit apply instead a concept of "collective knowledge," and the Sixth Circuit rejects the respondeat superior and collective knowledge approaches and applies a third approach because it views that neither the respondeat superior approach nor the collective knowledge approach is ideal or effectuates the purpose of securities fraud laws. In US government actions The US Supreme Court held in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009), that senior government officials could not be held liable for the unconstitutional conduct of their subordinates under a theory of respondeat superior. This is an example of the US Supreme Court making an exception to break from the general precedent of respondeat superior. In international law At issue in the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, after the Allied occupation of Nazi Germany after World War II, was a question concerning principles closely related to respondeat superior, which came to be known by the term command responsibility. The Nuremberg Trials established that the defense cannot be used of only following a superior's order if it violates international norms, and especially, superiors who ordered or "should have known" of such violations but failed to intervene are also criminally liable. See also Frolic and detour Products liability Qui facit per alium facit per se Superior orders Vicarious liability Worker's compensation References External links Fred Moore Whitney, The Doctrine of Respondeat Superior, thesis for the degree of Bachelor of Laws (1891). Cornell University. Historical Theses and Dissertations Collection Paper 147. Harvard Law