It's been 10 years since Enron filed for bankruptcy--and people are still talking about it.

The opinions are still passionately held. Many of the true faithful still defend the company at every turn. Some are even staging reunions. Others, including lots of former employees, still feel burned by upper management. It has been a hard road back to financial good standing for all too many. As for former CEO Jeff Skilling--a man who has gone down in corporate history as a great rogue--he  remains in jail, still plotting how he might get out of his 24-year sentence early. Last month, he again asked the Supreme Court for a new trial.

Apart from the personal trauma, the most enduring legacy of the Enron implosion was Sarbanes-Oxley, which became law in 2002. It was a hallmark of the George Bush era and has been a staple of the regulatory and financial landscape ever since. It was a landmark law, one that was intended to prevent corporate rogues like Skilling, Fastow and so many others at different firms (Kozlowski, the father and son Rigas duo, Bernie Ebbers, Joe Nacchio and on and on) from wreaking corporate havoc ever again.

An obvious question is, did the law work?

Obviously, it did not eradicate mismanagement. Even though the law requires big company CEOs and CFOs to personally sign off on the financials, we've still seen some massive failures--think Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. Frankly, several big banks were too close to the edge for comfort back in 2008. All this despite Sarbanes-Oxley.

One could argue that the implosions we've seen recently make Enron look like small taters. We're still seeing a lot of reckless behavior. MF Global stands as a great example. Audit firms, even in the wake of the Arthur Andersen death penalty, are still not shining examples of probity. They have been implicated in the many Wall Street implosions as well. The Ernst & Young work for Lehman Brothers is a great example. Some people remain incensed that a top executive of a financial services firm was never criminally charged.

And to get into the specifics, one could really nitpick the law. The whistleblower provisions were rendered a joke by the courts. Small companies were given a reprieve on 404 (b). And so on.

To be sure, the law had a salutary effect in some areas. While there have been some high profile mishaps--and some argue they reflect mainly once-in-a-lifetime circumstances--we've also seen the number financial restatement decline markedly. We've seen more companies pay attention to ethics and compliance. We've seen the rise of the chief compliance officer and the chief risk officer. We've also seen companies get the costs of compliance under control. Corporate directors are now expected to work for their pay.

The bottom line is that fraud will never be fully preventable. If you have executives bents on risky activity, it will be hard to thwart, no matter how strong the board or other executives . At the same time, the market, for whatever reason, is not viewed as a hospitable place for average Joes and Janes right now. That's lamentable.

So was the law worth it? Please post a comment. -Jim