Legal Commentary

If you are interested in the intersection of entrepreneurship and the law, the Kauffman Foundation, the leading sponsor of entrepreneurship development in the country, has funded an Entrepreneurship Law resource on its website, www.entrepreneurship.org.  This includes teaching materials.  (I think I contributed something, but I just registered myself so I'm not sure.)

For many of the same reasons expressed in my last post (and based on a fair amount of experience in the area), my reaction to "entrepreneurship law" is something like my reaction to my own travails as an athlete, which is that I think too much (this is known as "paralysis by analysis").  For a short sample of my contrarian view on this subject, see Why the Law of Entrepreneurship Barely Matters, the gist of which can be boiled down to this excerpt:

The entrepreneur . . . sees the world as a moveable feast of phenomena, posing danger and opportunity to be seized and exploited, and choices to be made, over and over again. One entrepreneurship scholar sees the entrepreneur's mode of reasoning as effectual rather than causal:  while causal reasoning posits a goal and seeks means to the goal, effectual reasoning "begins with a given set of means and allows goals to emerge contingently over time from the varied imagination and diverse aspirations of the founders and the people they interact with." 

The essence of thinking like a lawyer is causal reasoning, and not surprisingly, lawyers and entrepreneurs tend to be ships passing in the night.  (For a far more scathing assessment of the constricted scientific paradigm - in a Kuhnian sense - of legal academia, see Pierre Schlag's essay on spam jurisprudence and air law, and Richard Posner's bemused but ultimately mild concurrence.)

The scholar referred to in the block quote is Saras Sarasvathy (pictured, left), who is at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and who established her chops working with Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon (he of behavioral economics fame).  I had the pleasure of chatting with Professor Sarasvathy for a few minutes when she was in Boston last December, and I was delighted to find a couple days ago that a site to which I subscribe, Big Think, had a series of online interviews with her.  Enjoy!