Truth on the Market: Corporate & Securities Law

Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Corporate & Securities Law Blogs

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

Corporate & Securities Law

Truth on the Market

Academic commentary on law, business, economics and more.

Post Frequency: 39.9/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 00:51:38

The general economy vs. the law job economy

Posted on March 07, 2011
LawBlog seems surprised that while jobs are picking up generally, the law industry is still losing jobs. No surprise to me: as I discuss here and here, the problems with legal jobs are structural, not cyclical. The financial crisis precipitated a demand-side rethinking of legal services that was long overdue...

The prosecutor finds a consolation prize

Posted on March 07, 2011
Lattman: Mr. Bharara’s focus on insider trading has surprised many people on Wall Street. They had expected his office to instead bring criminal charges against top executives at the large banks that were at the center of the financial crisis. The government’s gotten a lot of heat for not charging these executives, including at the [...

My new paper on the future of legal education

Posted on March 04, 2011
As previously reported, I spoke last week at the Iowa Law Review Symposium on The Future of Legal Education. The CHR discussed some of the festivities. Here’s some tidbits from that article (which didn’t report on my panel or talk): Law schools are not moving with changing times...

The iPad 2 and the E2

Posted on March 04, 2011
Professor B says: In the last week I used my iPad to: Watch QI on Youtube. Watch TV shows, movies, and music videos from my iTunes library. Online banking. Online shopping. Web access. WSJ. BBC. Dinner reservations over Open Table. Deer Hunter. Online poker...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Gans on Apple and Antitrust

Posted on March 03, 2011
Joshua Gans has an interesting post examining potential antitrust issues involving Apple, an issue we’ve discussed here and here. Gans focuses in on the two most relevant issues: There are two aspects that might raise antitrust concern: (i) Apple?s exclusivity-like requirement that no external payment links be permitted in apps and (ii) Apple?s most-favored customer [...

The constitutional privacy rights of business entities

Posted on March 02, 2011
The Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion by Justice Roberts, held in FCC v. ATT, Inc.: We reject the argument that because ?person? is defined for purposes of FOIA to include a corporation, the phrase ?personal privacy? in Exemption 7(C) reaches corporations as well...

Empirical Legal Scholarship, Empirical Legal Scholars, and the Quality of Legal Education: A Response to Professor Bainbridge

Posted on March 02, 2011
Professor Bainbridge isn?t fond of empirical legal scholarship; more significantly, he asserts that law professors trained to pursue it fundamentally undercut the purposes of legal academia. (His judgment on legal academics which moonlight as amateur statisticians remains to be seen...

Some Links

Posted on March 02, 2011
EU raid on e-book publishers Ginsburg & Miles on the rise of empirical c0-authorship in the law Mike McCann updates on the Barry Bonds trial Federalism and online gambling David Henderson and Chris DeMuth remember economist Jack Calfee Filed under: truth on the market

Abercrombie’s Ohio express slows down

Posted on March 01, 2011
Last December Abercrombie filed a preliminary proxy statement announcing a plan to reincorporate from Delaware to Ohio. Steve Davidoff and I commented on the move. Steve noted that, while Abercrombie had highlighted various reasons for the move, the shareholders had to dig through the disclosures to learn that it was, as I said in December, [...

EU Bans Insurer Price Discrimination Based on Gender

Posted on March 01, 2011
From the WSJ: The European Union’s highest court declared illegal the widespread practice of charging men and women different rates for insurance, roiling the industry and setting in motion an overhaul of how life, auto and health policies are written across Europe...

The myth of competition among non-profit law schools

Posted on March 01, 2011
In Law & Economics in Japan, Harvard’s Mark Ramseyer tries to explain why Japanese scholars have mostly not embraced law and economics to the extent of their peers elsewhere. He tries on some explanations — “the location of legal education in the undergraduate curriculum, and the long-term Marxist domination of economics faculties” — but is [...

An update on the evolving e-book market: Kindle edition (pun intended)

Posted on March 01, 2011
A year ago I wrote about the economics of the e-book publishing market in the context of the dispute between Amazon and some publishers (notably Macmillan) over pricing. At the time I suggested a few things about how the future might pan out (never a god idea ...

What’s in the Howrey name?

Posted on February 28, 2011
The Recorder (HT Law Blog), discussing the Howrey endgame: One issue that?s in play is the matter of the prestigious Howrey name. A former Howrey lawyer in California said Winston might pay $2 million or more for the Howrey moniker. The goal had been to name the new firm Winston Howrey, but one lawyer told [...

An inside speech for Inside Job

Posted on February 28, 2011
I didn’t watch the Oscars last night, following my usual habit. But I note that “Inside Job” was supposedly the best documentary. The filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, said in accepting ?Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has [...

The economics of television

Posted on February 26, 2011
I was forced to watch my first episode of “Two and a Half Men” last week. Family members drugged me unconscious and then bound and gagged me, locked my head in the direction of the television and taped my eyelids open. The most horrible moment came when I realized that this was neither satire nor [...

Apple, Antitrust, and the FTC

Posted on February 25, 2011
Antitrust investigators continue to see smoke rising around Apple and the App Store. From the WSJ: For starters, subscriptions must be sold through Apple?s App Store. For instance, a magazine that wants to publish its content on an iPad cannot include a link in an iPad app that would direct readers to buy subscriptions through [...

The Economics of Friendship

Posted on February 25, 2011
Here is an excerpt from Eric Posner’s review of Ethan Leib’s book on regulating friendship, Friend v. Friend: We should require an affirmative reason to regulate. Leib says that friendship is important, that it is central to human identity, that?since friends enter economic relationships with each other?it may lubricate economic growth...

Carl Shapiro to CEA

Posted on February 24, 2011
The WSJ reports that Carl Shapiro, deputy assistant attorney general for economics in the DOJ’s antitrust division, has been nominated by President Obama to his Council of Economic Advisers. Also worth noting is that Phil Weiser, also a former deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division, is now senior advisor for technology and innovation [...

Elite College Pays — For Men, But Not Women

Posted on February 23, 2011
David Leonhart points out the new Dale & Krueger study on the value of an elite undergraduate education. His punchline: A decade ago, two economists ? Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger ? published a research paper arguing that elite colleges did not seem to give most graduates an earnings boost...

Friday at Iowa: The Future of Legal Education

Posted on February 23, 2011
At this symposium I will be joining (as virtually the only simple professor) a distinguished group of judges, deans, and former deans to discuss the above subject. Predictably, given my role, I’m going to defend the continuing role of theory (or at least particular sorts of theory) in the constrained future of legal education...

Schools for Misrule

Posted on February 23, 2011
Walter Olson journeyed to Illinois yesterday to discuss his new book Schools for Misrule. There was a good turnout and a lot of deserved buzz for this very interesting book. Walter describes law schools as essentially the hatcheries of bad ideas that have led to the sort of excessive litigation that Olson has chronicled in [...

Angelo’s escape

Posted on February 23, 2011
So Mozilo won’t be criminally prosecuted for Countrywide. Holman Jenkins writes in today’s WSJ: The incentive to bring a case against a vilified public figure, of course, is huge. Weighed against this, however, must be the chance of being humiliated by a judge, possibly censured, now that the legal system has started blowing the whistle [...

SCOTUS Denies Cert in Leegin II

Posted on February 22, 2011
From the WSJ: The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to take another look at its controversial 2007 antitrust ruling that allowed manufacturers to set retail prices for their products. The court, without comment, rejected an appeal by the Texas boutique retailer that was on the losing end of the court’s 5-4 decision nearly four [...

A nation of lawyers and judges

Posted on February 21, 2011
Doing just about anything in the U.S. today involves seeing a lawyer. Congress, the states and administrative agencies have passed a vast network of laws spreading over all aspects of life — not just business transactions, but family relationships, personal finance, the workplace, birth and death...

Some Links

Posted on February 21, 2011
Ann Althouse is indispensable on the Wisconsin protests (start here to catch up) David Henderson on collective bargaining rights Bainbridge on the top 10 presidents The latest on the potential Apple antitrust investigations (see my previous commentary here) Filed under: truth on the market

Lawyers as sponges and thieves

Posted on February 19, 2011
Andy Kessler writes in Thursday’s WSJ: With a heavy regulatory burden, payroll taxes and health-care costs, employing people is very expensive. * * * Tellers, phone operators, stock brokers, stock traders: These jobs are nearly extinct. Since 2007, the New York Stock Exchange has eliminated 1,000 jobs...

Dan Crane’s The Institutional Structure of Antitrust Enforcement

Posted on February 17, 2011
Dan Crane’s new book is now available from Oxford University Press (HT: Danny Sokol). Dan has been a repeat visitor to TOTM, is a co-author, and his scholarship on is always insightful. I suspect this book will become a standard reference in the growing antitrust institutions literature...

Unconscionability for corporate law

Posted on February 17, 2011
So you thought unconscionability was for furniture stores? Larry Cunningham has news for you: This Article explains why and how traditional contract law?s theory of unconscionability should be used to create a modicum of judicial scrutiny to strike obnoxious pay contracts and preserve legitimate ones...

Lawyers in Jeopardy

Posted on February 17, 2011
The WSJ reports: In a nationally televised competition, the Watson computer system built by International Business Machines Corp. handily defeated two former “Jeopardy” champions. * * * To emulate the human mind, and make it competitive on the TV quiz show, Watson was stuffed with millions of documents?including dictionaries, anthologies and the World Book Encyclopedia...

Is the FTC Moving to the National Gallery of Art?

Posted on February 17, 2011
The Federal Trade Commissioners have posted a letter to Congressmen John Mica and Nick Rahall, members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, “in response to legislative action by the Committee to transfer the historic FTC Building to the National Gallery of Art...

Previous | Next

Related Law Bulletins

Housing Market: Mixed Signals about Falling Prices for February
Two reports have been issued, one by the Massachusetts Association...

Fish on "Religion Without Truth"
Here's a (relatively) recent Stanley Fish Think Again column, call...