Academic

Casebook Authors, Don?t Let Your Students Read Ian Ayres

By Kim Krawiec

Unless you want to shell out some rebate money, that is.  In a post over at Freakonomics today, Ayres reveals that he paid out more than $150 in rebate money to his contracts small section this year, because he assigned his own contracts casebook and is trying to reduce the financial conflict of interest that professors have in assigning their own books.  Ayres wrote a 2005 New York Times Op-Ed on the topic, arguing that:

This is a self-dealing transaction, which would be presumptively illegal if professors owed a fiduciary duty to students. Some professors realize this and donate to charity the royalties they earn when they assign students their own books.

So this year, I am going to do something different. I will give $11 to each of my contracts students who buys my book. That way, we will all know that I assigned the book for the right reason.

In an article yesterday, The Yale Daily News reported on the rising price of textbooks, and the large number of Yale professors who assign their own books in class.  Some of the professors interviewed for the piece give the royalty money earned from their students back to the students, or give it to charities in their respective fields of study.  Others do not. 

According to Ayres:

When I originally published the Op-Ed, I received dozens of emails from professors around the country indicating that they disgorge their royalty. So students, if your professor has asked you to buy his or her book, ask for a rebate. A small way to make professors more sensitive about the price of the books they are assigning is to think about the royalties they are generating for themselves.

I see that, around the time of the NY Times Op Ed, there was some blogosphere discussion of law professor practices, much of which seemed to take the contrary view.  Do the casebook authors among us know whether views on this have changed since the 2005 discussion?  How common today is rebate or donation among law school professors who assign their own casebooks (my, quite uninformed, impression is that it?s rare)? Is there a Conversations About Ian Ayres and The People He Fights With series in my future?  I?d be interested to hear as well from those with knowledge about norms in other disciplines.  Do different fields have different views on this practice?

As only befits the Freakonomics crowd, the commenters have already proposed a number of ways to game the rebate system, earning extra income for themselves and depriving their professors of additional royalties.  Others have offered solutions to the system-gaming problem.  All in all, an interesting conversation.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on September 11, 2009 (boomark / email).