Academic

I am sitting in a classroom at Drexel University's Earle Mack School of Law, participating in the Third Law & Entrepreneurship Retreat. Christine, Usha, and a slew of former Glom guest bloggers -- including our host, Karl Okamoto -- are in attendance.

The goals of the Retreat are to encourage the development of scholarship at the intersection of law and entrepreneurship and to build the community of people who identify themselves as interested in such scholarship. In the First Law & Entrepreneurship Retreat, we spent a lot of time talking about the question, "What is Entrepreneurship?" Although that question still hovers over our gathering, most of us have come to terms with the field and are now going about the business of producing scholarship.

The projects being discussed here are mostly at a very early stage of development, which is exactly the way we want it. Our gathering is intentionally small (only 14 people this year), and our discussions are highly interactive. To give you a sense of the subject matter, here is the lineup of papers:

Brian Broughman, Do VCs Misbehave? Some Evidence from Silicon Valley (presented by Bobby Bartlett)

Christine Hurt, The Windfall Myth (presented by Kim Krawiec)

Darian Ibrahim, Building the Next Silicon Valley: The Role of Angel Investors in Economic Development (presented by Roger Dennis)

Florencia Marotta Wurgler, Who Reads Fine Print on the Web? A Test of the "Informed Minority" Hypothesis (presented by Ronald Mann)

Karl Okamoto, After the Bailout: Regulating Systemic Moral Hazard (presented by Bob Lawless)

Usha Rodrigues, Towards a Theory of the Expressive Value of the Nonprofit Form (presented by Diane Burton)

D. Gordon Smith & D. Daniel Sokol, Law & Entrepreneurship: A Literature Review (presented by Danny Sokol)

This is one of my favorite events of the academic year because it's one of those rare venues where all of the participants are engaged.