I have been working on a draft article for the University of Cincinnati Law Review based on a presentation that I gave this spring at the annual Corporate Law Symposium.  This year's topic was "Crowdfunding Regulations and Their Implications."  My draft article addresses the public-private divide in the context of the Capital Raising Online While Deterring Fraud and Unethical Non-Disclosure Act–more commonly known as the CROWDFUND Act.  I am using two pieces coauthored by Don Langevoort and Bob Thompson (here and here), as well as three works written by Hillary Sale (here, here, and here) to engage my analysis.

I also will be participating in a discussion group at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools annual conference in August on the publicness theme.  That session is entitled "Does The Public/Private Divide In Federal Securities Regulation Make Sense?" and is scheduled for 3:00 pm on Augut 6th, for those attending the conference.  Michael Guttentag was good enough to recruit the group for this discussion.

All this work on publicness has my head spinning!  There are a number of unique conceptions of pubicness, some overlapping or otherwise interconnected, with different conceptions being useful in different circumstances.  I am attracted to a number of observations in both the Langevoort/Thompson and Sale bodies of work, but there's clearly a lot more to think about from the standpoint of both scholarship and teaching.

So, today I ask:  What does publicness mean to you?  Does there continue to be salient meaning in the distinction between piublic and private (offerings, companies, etc.)?  If so, what should publicness mean in these contexts?  I am curious to see what others think.