Academic

Mark your calendars:  Monday, July 28, 2008 the Conglomerate Junior Scholars Workshop begins!  As a junior scholar, I have had many conversations about the difficulties of new professors getting good feedback, mentoring, and workshop opportunities.  As always, we try to be part of the solution, not the problem.  To that end, we continue our four-year tradition of a summer workshop by bringing five papers from five pre-tenured authors.  Although every junior scholar (and junior associate, etc.) claims to want feedback, these olks are actually putting their work on the line for real feedback, which says a lot about them as current and future scholars.

In case you are new to the Glom, the workshop will run like this: over the next three weeks from July 28 to August 11, we will showcase one paper every few days.  Three or more reviewers will have already written comments to this paper, and I will post those comments the morning of the chosen day.  At that point, comments will be open and we hope that our interested and engaged readers will take the ball from there.  We treat this workshop just like an academic conference.  You are encouraged to stand up and ask a question, but you have to state your name (i.e., no anonymous comments).  And, like a conference, if you have a question or an insight that you would rather offer after the talk at "the podium," feel free to email the author directly.

The participants in the Fourth Annual Conglomerate Junior Scholars Workshop are:

? July 28: Brian Broughman, The Role of Independent Directors in VC-Backed Firms

? July 30: Ethan J. Leib, Friends as Fiduciaries

? August 4: Heather Field, Checking in on Check-the-Box

? August 6: James Park, Assessing Materiality of Financial Misstatements

? August 11: Minor Myers, The Decisions of Corporate Special Litigation Committees:  An Empirical Investigation

Our gracious commentators include (in no particular order): Tom Ulen, Bill Carney, Larry Ribstein, Brett McDonald, Doug Moll, Bob Lawless, Barbara Black, Steven Dean, Gregg Polsky, Leandra Lederman, Joan Heminway, Adam Pritchard, and former workshop participants Darian Ibrahim, David Gamage, Eric Goldman, Paul Rose, Bill Henderson and Dave Hoffman. The workshop does not run without these wonderful people, and we are very grateful to them.

Next week, I will post links to all five papers. See you then!