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Haskell Murray

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Professor Murray teaches business law, business ethics, and alternative dispute resolution courses to undergraduate and graduate students. Currently, his research focuses on corporate governance, mergers & acquisitions, sports law, and social entrepreneurship law issues.

Professor Murray is the 2018-19 President of the Southeastern Academy of Legal Studies in Business (“SEALSB”) and is a co-editor of the Business Law Professor Blog. His articles have been published in a variety of journals, including the American Business Law Journal, the Delaware Journal of Corporate Law, the Harvard Business Law Review, and the Maryland Law Review. Read More

Last month, I was able to attend the SEALS Conference for the first time in a few years. It was good to see a number of old friends and meet some new ones. And I really enjoyed the many discussions on a wide variety of legal topics. 

While most academic panels are understandably focused on the mind, it was interesting to see a number of discussions focus on soul-related issues, including a couple on mindfulness/meditation and a few focused on religiously affiliated law schools. 

Traditionally, legal academics do an excellent job sharpening the mind. “Think like a lawyer” is a phrase even my colleagues across campus know. The soul gets much less attention at most schools, but that seems to be changing a bit, especially with increasing concerns for lawyer well-being. 

The body, however, seems almost entirely neglected both at the SEALS Conference and at law schools nationwide. Yes, there were tennis and pickleball tournaments, but I don’t think there was a single panel related to the physical health of our students, faculty, and staff.

At the undergraduate level, many universities have one or more required fitness classes, but I don’t know of any law school with similar requirements. …

There are quite a number of law schools hiring in the business law area this year, but if you are on the market, do not forget about business schools. Below are a few recent postings:

Baylor University (Chair in Accounting & Business Law)

Fairfield University

Indiana University

Middle Tennessee State University

University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)

University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN)

And here are my thoughts (from a decade ago!) on the differences I found moving from law school teaching to business school teaching. 

 

Dear BLPB Readers:

"The Institute for Law & Economics (ILE) at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School is pleased to announce its second annual Junior Faculty Business and Financial Law Workshop. The Workshop will be held in person on December 7, 2023 at Penn Carey Law.

The Workshop supports and recognizes the work of untenured legal scholars in the business and financial fields, including accounting, banking, bankruptcy, corporations, economics, finance, tax and securities, while promoting interactions with such scholars, selected tenured faculty and practitioners. By providing a forum for the exchange of creative ideas in these areas, ILE also aims to encourage new and innovative scholarship in the business and financial arena.

Approximately 6-8 papers will be chosen from those submitted for presentation at the Workshop. One or more senior scholars and practitioners will comment on each paper, followed by a general discussion of each paper among all participants. The Workshop audience will include invited untenured scholars, faculty from Penn Carey Law, The Wharton School, and other institutions, practitioners, and invited guests."

The deadline to submit papers for consideration is September 8th, 2023.  The complete call for papers is here.

Dear BLPB Readers:

"The University of Alabama School of Law seeks to fill up to five tenure-track positions for the 2024-25 academic year.

JOB QUALIFICATIONS: Candidates must have outstanding academic credentials, including a J.D. from an accredited law school or an equivalent degree (such as a Ph.D. in a related field). Entry-level candidates should demonstrate potential for strong teaching and scholarship. Qualified applicants in any of the following areas will be considered: civil procedure, criminal law, torts, property, environmental, business (all sub-fields), antitrust, healthcare, intellectual property, legal ethics, evidence, election law, employment/labor, state & local law, and law & economics. We welcome applications from candidates who approach scholarship from a variety of perspectives and methods. The University embraces diversity in its faculty, students, and staff, and we welcome applications from those who would add to the diversity of our academic community.

APPLICATIONS/FURTHER INFORMATION: Salary, benefits, and research support will be nationally competitive. All applications are confidential to the extent permitted by state and federal law. These positions will remain open until filled. Questions should be directed to Benjamin McMichael, Chair of the Faculty Appointments Committee (facappts@law.ua.edu). Interested candidates can apply online at https://careers.ua.edu/jobs/search/law

Visit UA’s employment website at …

Dear BLPB Readers,

I wanted to share the below call for papers with interested readers.  Please note the submission deadline of September 15, 2023.  

"We are welcoming submissions in the form of technical papers and policy-oriented papers (forum discussions) on the listed topics below (but not limited to). Please be aware that submissions deadline expires in September 15, 2023.

Papers can be submitted here

Topics of interest:

  • Payment and settlement systems;
  • Digital money (including CBDCs) and central bank operations;
  • Trade repositories, central counterparties (CCPs) and central securities depositories (CSDs);
  • Risk management of FMIs (including liquidity, market, counterparty, operational and other risks);
  • Correspondent banking and network analysis of FMIs;
  • Non-bank payment service providers and access to central bank payment rails;
  • Exchanges and multilateral trading platforms;
  • Regulation, oversight and supervision of FMIs;
  • Tokenized deposits and stablecoins;
  • New technologies for FMIs, including distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Papers can be submitted here

To learn more about our submission guidelines, please click here"

Dear BLPB Readers:

Below is an excerpt from the call for papers (complete call here) for the 6th Conference on Law and Macroeconomics to be held on November 2-3, 2023 at Tulane Law School.  The deadline for submissions for consideration is August 1, 2023.

"The past year has seen a dramatic increase in economic, financial, social, and political turmoil worldwide. Policy responses to price instability have in turn generated predictable but unforeseen collateral crises and vulnerabilities, including bank failures, asset market turmoil, and rising risks of domestic, regional, and global recession, which require their own policy responses. Climate, public health, and migration challenges persist and continue to reflect vast economic disparities.

These developments reinforce the imperative of research at the intersection of law and macroeconomics, even as they recast and sharpen our understanding of the field. They form the background for the  Sixth Conference on Law and Macroeconomics.

The conference will be held on November 2-3, 2023, at Tulane Law School in New Orleans, Louisiana. We welcome submissions for papers that address the following topics, among others:

  1. Monetary policy and institutions, including comparative approaches to achieving price stability;
  2. Fiscal policy, including legal and regulatory tools to mitigate the

…

Dear BLPB Readers:

Below is an excerpt from the call for papers for the upcoming Wharton Conference on Liquidity and Financial Fragility

"Liquidity and financial fragility concerns have captured the attention of financial market participants, macroeconomists, and policymakers in recent years. The pandemic featured unprecedented liquidity dry-up and fragility in financial markets, followed by massive policy interventions and inflationary pressures not seen in decades. The collapses of the Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse revealed neglected risks and have forced depositors and investors to rethink some of their decisions. Fifteen years after the global financial crisis, the financial system does not appear to be safer and the need to better understand the sources and consequences of financial fragility remains high.

With this goal, we are resuming the Wharton Conference on Liquidity and Financial Fragility, following the success of the eight editions that took place before the pandemic. The next edition, hosted by the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation (WIFPR), will take place at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA) starting on the morning of Friday, October 6, 2023, and ending in the afternoon of Saturday, October 7, 2023. Details of previous conferences can be…

This week, Nasdaq, “the second-largest stock exchange in the US,” announced its biggest deal yet: the $10.5 billion acquisition of Adenza, a software company focused on financial risk.  As I note in Derivatives and ESG, trading exchanges’ traditional business models have undergone a metamorphosis.  The largest global exchanges are increasingly becoming financial data and technology juggernauts.  Indeed, Nasdaq’s press release about the deal states: “Nasdaq Accelerates Its Transformation as a Leading Technology Provider to the Global Financial System with the Acquisition of Adenza from Thoma Bravo.” 

As I write about in Trading in the Clouds, a short piece for our 2022 BLPB Symposium Connecting the Threads VI hosted by the University of Tennessee College of Law, the continuing transformation of exchanges’ business models has also recently included significant partnerships between some of the world's largest trading exchange groups and the biggest cloud service providers, including Microsoft's partnership with the London Stock Exchange Group, Nasdaq's partnership with Amazon Webservices, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's partnership with Google Cloud.     

Here's the abstract for Trading in the Clouds:     

"Today, countless organizations rely upon cloud computing for operational and strategic reasons.

In today’s post, I wanted to highlight two more works (previous posts here and here) of University of Michigan Professor Emeritus George Siedel.

First, Siedel recently wrote an informative piece in the ABAJournal entitled, Consider teaching law in a business school as an alternative career.  This helpful article should be especially useful to BLPB readers who might be interested in teaching law in a business school or simply curious to understand ways in which teaching law in a business school might be different from teaching law in a law school.  

Second, in a previous post (here) I mentioned Siedel’s book Seven Essentials for Business Success: Lessons from Legendary Professors.  I just finished reading it.  Definitely well-worth my time and effort!!  There are so many great ideas here that I can’t wait to put into practice when the fall semester begins!  It seems that great teachers combine stellar “teaching processes” with what Siedel terms “authenticity.”  From his study of and interviews with the legendary professors, he identifies “[s]ix themes relating to the teaching process” (p.186): 1) “Prepare, Prepare, Prepare,” 2) “Build a Learning Community,” 3) “Emphasize the Big Picture,” 4) “Simplify, Simplify,” 5) “Make…

Yesterday, a new paper by Cecilia Caglio, Jennifer Dlugosz, and Marcelo Rezende – all affiliated with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System – posted on SSRN, Flight to Safety in the Regional Bank Crisis of 2023.  It's obviously an incredibly timely piece.  Here's the Abstract:

"Using weekly confidential data from U.S. banks, we document an unprecedented flight to safety of deposits from regional banks towards large banks in the early 2023. We show that large banks experienced large deposit inflows relative to small and regional banks and that these differences remain substantial if we account for bank characteristics associated with bank failures over this crisis, including liquidation values and shares of uninsured deposits. Large banks lowered deposit rates relative to other banks during the crisis, supporting the hypothesis that deposits flew to these banks because they are considered safer."