Photo of Colleen Baker

Colleen Baker

Subscribe to Colleen Baker's Posts

PhD (Wharton) Professor Baker is an expert in banking and financial institutions law and regulation, with extensive knowledge of over-the-counter derivatives, clearing, the Dodd-Frank Act, and bankruptcy, in addition to being a mediator and arbitrator.

Previously, she spent time at the U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Business, the U. of Notre Dame Law School, and Villanova University Law School. She has consulted for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and for The Volcker Alliance.  Prior to academia, Professor Baker worked as a legal professional and as an information technology associate. She is a member of the State Bars of NY and TX. Read More

I was recently asked to serve on an ABA site team to reaccredit a law school. I have done this before; it’s hard work, but it’s fun. You get to see how another law school operates and meet many legal educators you might not otherwise meet.  But I turned this one down and I told the ABA to take me off their list of potential accreditors.

I have decided that I will no longer serve as an ABA accreditor. I see no evidence that ABA review is doing much to increase the quality of legal education. The accreditation rules stifle creativity, protect traditional law schools from competition, and increase the cost of legal education.

The newly revised ABA standards are better in some ways than the current standards. They accommodate some technological changes, although at least ten years too late. And I was happy to see that the restrictions on distance education were loosened a little. But the changes are too little, too late.

Ironically, the new ABA standards require law schools to justify their programs based on student outcomes, something the accreditation rules themselves have never done.

I’m not willing to play the game anymore. I’ll leave enforcement of…

One thing that distinguishes excellent lawyers (or excellent academics, for that matter) is the ability to see more than one side of a legal question—to marshal all the arguments for and against a position, and weigh their relative strengths.

A lawyer drafting a contract needs to foresee the various ways a contract might be interpreted and try to minimize the ambiguities. A lawyer advising a client about regulatory compliance needs to understand the different ways the applicable statutes and regulations might be read. A lawyer litigating a case needs to anticipate her opponent’s best arguments and the weaknesses in her own arguments to be an effective advocate.

But how does one teach open-mindedness to law students? It’s a problem on exams. Students often fixate on one view and ignore any arguments against their chosen positions.

It’s also a problem in the classroom. Once some students have taken a public position, it’s very hard to get them to concede that any argument against that position has validity. And some students come to class having already formulated a position about a particular case or policy issue, making the task even harder.

I have been teaching for over 25 years, and I’m still…

I began my twenty-ninth year of law school teaching this week. It has now been thirty-six years since I entered law school as a student. Except for  four years of practice, I have been there ever since.

The world has changed significantly, but legal education hasn’t changed much.

When I entered law school in 1978,

  • the Internet was still unknown to the general public, a concept that scientists and the government were still developing. 
  • The personal computer was just beginning to take off, and no one I knew had one. 
  • Laptops were where your child sat.
  • Lexis computerized research was just beginning.
  • PowerPoint presentations did not exist. 
  • You bought your telephone, securely connected to your wall, from Ma Bell.

It’s amazing, given all the changes since then, how little has changed in legal education.

When I began law school, grades were determined primarily by a single end-of-semester exam. In most cases, they still are.

When I began law school, the focus was on the development of analytical skills, and clinical education was secondary. Not much change there (yet).

When I began law school, professors were using chalk and blackboards. They’re now using whiteboards and PowerPoint slides, but primarily just to…

Students often ask me how they can improve their performance in my classes. There’s one thing they can do that will increase their learning with no additional work on their part: stop multitasking.

Multitasking is bad. The research is clear: students, even today’s students who grew up multitasking, learn less when they’re doing other things at the same time. See, for example, here and here. It’s a very simple point: if you surf the Internet, email, text, instant message, talk on the phone, or watch TV while you’re studying (or in the classroom), you learn less. Effective study (and work) requires focus.

It’s such an easy, effortless way to improve learning: just focus exclusively on what you’re reading, without any distractions. Turn off instant messaging. Close the web browser and the email program. Silence your phone. Turn off the TV.

I make that point to my students at the beginning of my classes.  but, for some of them, it just doesn’t sink in. I guess that shouldn’t surprise me: people text while they’re driving even as the casualties continue to mount.

I recently found an exercise on the Internet that illustrates the point in a straightforward, simple way. I’m…

I have read about the economic boom in North Dakota. The state has the highest economic growth rate and the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, primarily due to energy production using hydraulic fracking. But I didn’t really appreciate the statistics until I recently had an opportunity to see what that boom looks like “on the ground.”

Last week, my wife and I went to western North Dakota, the heart of the fracking industry, to backpack in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. When we weren’t backpacking, we got a chance to see the North Dakota economy first-hand. What we saw amazed us:

  • Motels in remote places like Dickinson and Watford City charging more than $200 a night. Not four-star hotels. Chains like AmericInn and La Quinta. And these are not prime tourist locations. Look for Watford City on a map; it’s in the middle of nowhere. (No disrespect intended to any North Dakota readers, but you have to admit that, but for the fracking boom, Watford City is not prime real estate.)
  • Temporary housing everywhere. One reason the hotel rates were high is that many of them are housing workers on a permanent basis. There is a serious housing

…

One of the blogs in last week’s list of blogs I follow was Lowering the Bar, a collection of humorous legal items edited by Kevin Underhill, a San Francisco lawyer.

Underhill recently released a book, The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance. The book is a collection of silly, weird, and humorous laws, with commentary by Underhill. The title comes from an ordinance adopted by the board of commissioners of Skamania County, Washington that made it illegal to slay Bigfoot. Apparently, the threat was serious because the county commissioners designated it as an emergency ordinance so it could become immediately effective.

Both Underhill’s selection of laws and his commentary are a little uneven. Some of the laws he features are not that interesting (or funny). And Underhill’s commentary on the laws, while often quite funny, sometimes falls flat. I also wish Underhill would have provided more legislative history. He sometimes does, but not always, and it would be interesting to know what motivated some of these strange laws. But the book contains some real gems, and that alone makes it worth reading.

Some of the laws are funny because of their clear unconstitutionality. In 2011, for example, the Gould, Arkansas city…

One of the reasons you read this blog is to keep up with developments related to business law and to read commentary on those developments. But how do we, the editors of this blog, keep up with new developments ourselves? What blogs and other sources do we follow?

I realize that, as a law professor, I probably have both more time and perhaps a greater professional obligation to keep up with law-related events and scholarship. And what I read is necessarily idiosyncratic, dependent in part on my particular interests and foibles. For some unknown reason, not everyone is interested in the latest from the SEC’s Division of Investment Management. And individual tastes vary; commentators I find interesting and informative, you might find banal, and vice versa.

But, with those disclaimers, here’s my list, for what it’s worth. I have divided it into four categories: blogs and RSS feeds, subscription services, daily news, and print resources. (Remember print? Those non-electronic things we used to hold in our hands.) I hope you’ll find something useful.

Blogs and RSS Feeds

To begin, let me admit that this list is incomplete. I only read blogs that offer RSS feeds. If they won’t deliver it…

The new crowdfunding exemption in section 4(a)(6) of the Securities Act will, once the SEC adopts the rules required to implement it, allow ordinary investors to invest in unregistered securities offerings. Will those unsophisticated investors go down in flames or will they be able to make rational investment choices?

Some proponents of crowdfunding argue that crowdfunding benefits from the so-called “wisdom of the crowd“: that the collective, consensus choice that results from crowdfunding is better than what any individual could do alone, and often as good as expert choices. A recent study seems to support that view.

Two business professors—Ethan R. Mollick at the Wharton School and Ramana Nanda at Harvard—looked at crowdfunding campaigns for theater projects. They submitted those projects to people with expertise in evaluating theater funding applications and compared the expert evaluations to the actual crowdfunding results.

Mollick and Nanda found a strong positive correlation between the projects funded by the crowd and those rated highly by the experts. In other words, crowds were more likely to fund the campaigns the experts preferred. In addition, projects funded by the crowd that were not rated highly by the experts did just as well as the…

Steve Bainbridge has an interesting response to yesterday’s post on law reviews, linking to a number of other interesting posts he has written. Definitely worth reading. (He agrees with me, so he must be correct.)

A number of you commented on my post yesterday. I will get those posted sometime today.  Sorry for the delay. My wife and I got back home this morning at 2:30 a.m. from a wonderful vacation trip to San Diego. (Yesterday’s post was scheduled in advance; we have a firm no-work rule during vacations.) 

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a review of an article on mutual fund fee litigation. In my post, I apologized for reviewing the article “late.”

I thought about the use of the word “late” after I posted. The article has been available on SSRN, the Social Science Research Network, since March, but it has not yet been published in a law review. But, in the world of blogs and instant access to everything, waiting until publication in print truly is late.

Most legal articles are now posted on SSRN as soon as they are finished, and I, like many other law professors, don’t wait until publication to read articles in my areas of interest. I pull those articles straight off SSRN. SSRN helpfully provides subject-specific emails with abstracts and links to newly posted articles.

My first crowdfunding article had hundreds of downloads before it appeared in print. It came out in a law review at almost the same time the final crowdfunding bill passed Congress; if I had not posted it on SSRN, it would have had no chance to affect the debate. (I’m not sure it had much effect anyway. The drafters of the final bill…