Throughout the week over at Securities Docket I highlight the most interesting columns and blog posts from around the web on the subjects of SEC enforcement and securities litigation. Here is a digest of my picks for the week ending November 1, 2013.

Madness of JPMorgan's $13bn settlement

Jacob Frenkel, Financial Times op-ed

In ancient times, when gladiators did battle to arbitrary rules, a thumb up determined who lived and thumb down decided who died. The $13bn JPMorgan Chase has agreed to pay to end US government investigations into mortgage bond sales appears just as capricious.

From Anonymity to Scourge of Wall Street

Peter Lattman and Ben Protess, DealBook

The architect of a recent legal crackdown on Wall Street's dubious mortgage practices was not the attorney general, a United States attorney or a rising star in the Justice Department. Instead, it was Leon W. Weidman, an unassuming 69-year-old career prosecutor, toiling away in anonymity 3,000 miles from Washington….

His pioneering use of the law — the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, or Firrea — underpinned the Justice Department's tentative $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase. The United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, has deployed the statute most often, filing civil fraud actions against Wells Fargo, BNY Mellon and Bank of America, among others. A jury found Bank of America liable in that case last week.

SAC and the Strange Focus on Insider Trading

Justin Fox, Harvard Business Review

It may seem strange that Wall Street's top cop has chosen to attack Galleon and SAC instead of the institutions at the heart of the mortgage meltdown that brought on the financial crisis. It may seem even stranger when you consider that a lot of legal scholars don't think insider trading is fraud, and a few even think it should be encouraged.

It is strange. That said, it's pretty clear why it happens: Bharara and his predecessors (Rudy Giuliani held the same job in the late 1980s) have taken on insider trading cases because they can win them….

Mary Jo White Is the Woman Who Makes Wall Street Admit Guilt

Sheelah Kolhatkar, Businessweek

White has been on the job for only six months, but the tone she's set can already be felt across Washington. Following her lead, other agencies and federal prosecutors are also demanding guilty pleas and enormous fines. On Oct. 16, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) agreed to pay $100 million to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to settle an investigation of the London Whale trades. On top of the fine, the bank was required to admit that its traders acted recklessly as they tried to limit the damage from the firm's disastrous, money-losing position in a credit-default index….

White isn't the first person inside or outside government to suggest that regulators should extract such admissions, “but she's certainly pushed it further,” says Peter Henning, a professor of securities law at Wayne State University. “She has made this more of a focal point.”

Potential Silver Lining for S.E.C. in the Cuban Case

Peter J. Henning, DealBook

No one likes to lose, so the Securities and Exchange Commission is surely smarting from a jury's decision absolving Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, of insider trading charges. Although the case garnered headlines, it is unlikely to have much effect on other investigations, and even has a potential silver lining for the S.E.C.

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