Photo of Haskell Murray

Haskell Murray

Subscribe to Haskell Murray's Posts

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

Social enterprise has made two relatively recent appearances in the mainstream media:

(1) David Brooks on “How to Leave a Mark” in the NYT.

(2) George Roberts on “Bringing a Business Approach to Doing Good” in the WSJ.

In addition, a few law schools have started focusing more on social enterprise, including through the Georgetown Social Enterprise and Nonprofit Clinic and the Social Enterprise Law Association at Harvard Law School. 

Interest in social enterprise is and has been increasing, but the legal frameworks could still use significant work as my co-blogger Joan Heminway noted last month.

Marc

The Business Law Prof Blog is pleased to announce that Professor Marc Edelman will be joining us as a guest blogger for the month of  March. Quoting from his online bio, “Marc Edelman is an Associate Professor of Law at the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York. He specializes in sports law, antitrust, intellectual property, and gaming law.” During the summers, he also teaches at Fordham University School of Law.

I was previously familiar with Marc Edelman’s work through my interest in sports and through a bit of reading in the antitrust area. All of his areas of interest have significant intersections with business law and I look forward to reading his posts. Given that he is one of the most recognized experts in the area of law & sports, we are especially privileged to have him with us right before March Madness. 

I’ve enjoyed getting to know a bit about University of Pennsylvania Psychology Professor Angela Duckworth’s work on “grit.” Duckworth and her co-authors call grit “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” and they claim that grit can be predictive of certain types of success.  

Can we, as educators, teach grit? If so, how? Duckworth asks, but doesn’t fully answer these questions in her popular TED talk. She does, however, think Stanford Psychology Professor Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset, which I wrote about a few months ago, offers the most hope.

Do readers have any thoughts on this subject? Feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me your thoughts.

Startupstash-icon-90x90

Via an Ethan Mollick (Wharton) tweet, I was recently introduced to Startup Stash.

Startup Stash is a beautifully simple set of curated resources for entrepreneurs. The categories of resources range from Naming to Hosting to Market Research to Marketing to Legal to Human Resources to Finance. And more.

As a law professor, I was obviously most curious about the legal resources. The list has the controversial and well-known Legal Zoom, but also has some relatively unknown resources. For example, UpCounsel (“get high-quality legal services from top business attorneys at reasonable rates”) was new to me. You can see the full list of legal resources here.

As previously stated, the Startup Stash list is curated, so there are only 10 legal resources, all of which look interesting, if also potentially dangerous for those without legal training. As I tell my business students, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and consulting with a knowledgeable attorney early in the start-up process can be invaluable. 

Seitz

The Chancery Daily reports that Governor Markell has nominated Collins “C.J.” Seitz, Jr. to the Delaware Supreme Court. The January 31, 2015 retirement of Justice Henry duPont Ridgely created the vacancy.

C.J. Seitz, Jr. has over thirty years of corporate/commercial/IP litigation experience and is a respected, influential member of the Delaware bar. He has also served as mediator, arbitrator, or special master in numerous cases.  He currently serves as a founding partner of Seitz Ross Aronstam & Moritz LLP.

Joan Heminway and I must be thinking similar thoughts because before I even saw her helpful post on business law jobs, I asked my former research assistant Samuel Moultrie to share his thoughts and advice on finding legal employment in this economic environment.

Sam is one of the hardest workers I know and took his job search seriously. He also took a big risk by going beyond the typical employers we had recruiting on campus when we were at Regent Law – mostly non-profits, government agencies, and a few VA and NC law firms. Sam wanted to practice in the state that has the greatest influence on U.S. corporate law and has made it happen. His journey was not and is not easy, but I thought his story might be inspiring. Recently, Sam was also selected as a 2015 Leadership Delaware Fellow. Sam’s thoughts on finding legal employment are reproduced below. 

———————————–

By: Samuel L. Moultrie

The job market for recent law school graduates is, without a doubt, miserable.  While the statistics seem to vary, I think it is safe to say that the supply of new law school graduates exceeds the number of legal job openings.  Nevertheless, graduates should not lose all hope.  Any law school graduate can find a job, if they are motivated, willing to work hard, and take steps to distinguish themselves. 

[More after the break]

As one of Belmont University’s pre-law advisors, I have been getting an increasing number of e-mails from law school representatives across the country who are trying to recruit our students. One thing that I have been pushing for is better employment data. For the most part, the law school representatives simply send me the ABA required data, which I can already find on my own. 

The ABA required data is somewhat helpful to me as an advisor, but the data is insufficient. We really need better salary data and complete (or near complete) employer/job title lists. Longitudinal studies, though difficult to do well, might be interesting.  

The ABA required data tells us how many of a law school’s graduates for a given year are employed in law firm jobs, judicial clerkships, government, public interest work, etc. The ABA data does not distinguish between an associate attorney position (~$160,000 + prestige + career mobility) and a staff attorney position (~$50,000 + no prestige + dead end, in most cases) at the same large firm – assuming both are full-time, long-term positions, which they can be. While I readily admit that salary is often not the most important part of a…

My co-blogger Anne Tucker inspired me with her useful conference list this week, and led me to create a list of my own.

Just in time for law review submission season, below are links to the submission webpages for the top-15 “Corporations and Association” specialty law journals as ranked by Washington & Lee University. The starred journals were not included in the “Corporations and Associations” dropdown ranking, but I found them in the full list and placed them in their respective spots (according to the overall rankings). I am not sure Yale Journal on Regulation belongs in this grouping, but I will leave it in since W&L includes it. 

  1. Yale Journal on Regulation
  2. Harvard Business Law Review       
  3. The Journal of Corporation Law
  4. American Business Law Journal
  5. Delaware Journal of Corporate Law
  6. Columbia Business Law Review
  7. Berkeley Business Law Journal*
  8. University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law*
  9. Stanford Journal of Law, Business & Finance*
  10. Virginia Law & Business Review*
  11. The Hastings Business Law Journal*
  12. The Business Lawyer
  13. Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law
  14. New York University Journal of Law & Business*
  15. Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business*

For what it is worth, I am not sold…

I recently purchased and read two Cass Sunstein (Harvard) books: Simpler: The Future of Government and Wiser: Getting Beyond GroupThink to Make Groups Smarter (with Reid Hastie (Chicago))

Cass Sunstein is a enjoyable writer to read, and Simpler was an easy, relatively short read (though he admits that his editor prompted the cutting of 30,000 words from the original manuscript). I may do a separate post on Wiser at a later date.

Simpler provides an inside look at Cass Sunstein’s time at the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (“OIRA”) from 2009-2012. Supposedly, OIRA was created by the Paperwork Reduction Act in 1980. OIRA plays an important role in overseeing federal regulation.

A few random thoughts about Simpler:

  • If you have read Sunstein’s earlier work, Kahneman (Princeton), and Ariely (Duke) much of Simpler will be familiar behavioral economics;
  • Sunstein’s political confirmation process sounds absolutely awful. I wonder how many qualified potential civil servants are scared away by processes like this;
  • The Food Plate (below) is much simpler than the Food Pyramid I grew up with;
  • Sunstein reminded me that sometimes rule-makers (including professors – e.g. with our syllabi) can become experts in rule systems,

…