Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law and the John F. Scarpa Center for Law and Entrepreneurship are pleased to host the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Law & Economics Association (MLEA) October 18-19, 2019 in Villanova, Pennsylvania. Presentations will begin Friday morning and end late afternoon on Saturday.

Villanova invites participants from across the nation (not just the Midwest) and abroad. Papers can be on any topic that touches on law and economics. This includes, for example, papers with empirical analysis and economic modeling, as well as papers that address legal doctrine or theory that have been informed by economic thought. To apply, submit a paper or abstract to Tammi Etheridge (Tammi.Etheridge@law.villanova.edu) no later than 4:00 pm EST on Friday, August 9, 2019.

There are no registration or membership fees. Participants will finance their own travel and hotel costs. Please register at https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/c993420b5e284ac2b073d7931ccf9725. A block of rooms at The Radnor Hotel has been reserved for conference participants at a rate of $165/night (excluding tax). You can book by calling the hotel directly at (610) 688-5800. Use Group ID “Midwestern Law and Economics Conference” to receive the special conference rate. You will need to reserve your…

The AALS Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation Section has a call for papers touching on investment advice and retirement savings.  There is so much going on on this front with the DOL getting ready to put its own gutted revamped fiduciary rule out, the new SEC Regulation Best Interest, and so many other things happening.  Plus, with over 10,000 Boomers turning 65 each day, these issues will only get more and more attention in the years ahead.

Call for Papers

Section on Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation

2020 AALS Annual Meeting

January 2-6, 2020 – Washington, D.C.

The AALS Section on Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for the section panel for the 2020 AALS Annual Meeting.  The Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation section panel is scheduled from 3:30-5:15 p.m., January 2, 2020.  The panel is graciously co-sponsored by the Sections on Aging and the Law, Employment Discrimination, Labor Relations and Employment Law, and Poverty Law.

The topic for this year’s Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation panel is:

The Road to Wellbeing: Navigating the Potholes to Lifetime Financial Security

Panel Description: Although traditional employer-provided retirement and health…

A new paper from a powerhouse trio just hit SSRN.  Steve Choi, Adam Pritchard, and Jessica Erickson teamed up to take a look at attorneys’ fees in securities class actions.  Erickson announced it earlier today with some quick summary tweets:

New paper alert! When it comes to securities class actions, we worry a lot about low-value settlements. My paper with Steve Choi and Adam Pritchard looks at the cases on the other end of the spectrum–the largest settlements in securities class actions. https://t.co/1fGRY9wZWd

— Jessica Erickson (@ProfJErickson) July 18, 2019

They collected data on over 1,700 settlements to examine how high and low value settlements differ from each other and whether judges treat the high-value cases differently than the low value ones.   Interestingly, they found some evidence that attorneys may engage in some make-work in high-value cases in order to justify collecting big fees. With all of the data they collected, we’ll likely see many more papers coming out of this set. 

Hopefully, the data will help courts make better decisions when scrutinizing fee requests in mega-settlements.  One challenge will be getting the information before courts reviewing settlements.  The attorneys representing parties generally have little incentive to police…

William & Mary’s Kevin Haeberle has a new paper entitled Information Asymmetry and the Protection of Ordinary Investors.  It takes a close look at the degree to which the core securities laws designed to reduce information asymmetry actually protect ordinary investors in the stock market.  Haeberle explains how market makers adjust prices to manage the costs information asymmetry imposes on them.  He focuses on how this response creates illiquidity in the market.  But then he explains that while this illiquidity hurts many investors, it also helps others—namely, longer-term investors. Thus, reducing information asymmetry will affect different investors in different ways, turning on the time horizon of their investment. 

His  key takeaway is then that securities laws reducing information asymmetry impose a long-overlooked cost on at least buy-and-hold ordinary investors (including both those who trade directly and those who invest through mutual funds), while conferring only limited benefits to those investors. Accordingly, whatever it does for society, an excessive focus on stopping some investors from making “unfair” gains based on superior information may actually  be a bad thing for ordinary investors.

Haeberle closes out the paper by pointing out that the SEC would likely be more effective in protecting ordinary investors…

Arizona State’s Laura N. Coordes has a new paper up making a powerful case for overhauling bankruptcy laws for health care.  Despite the soaring, and seemingly irrational medical costs paid by patients, health care bankruptcies have been on the rise.  Since 2010, health care bankruptcies have increased by 123% while bankruptcies across all sectors have declined by 58%. The problems are not evenly distributed.  Financial distress may be most concentrated in rural hospitals.  If these hospitals continue to fail and close because they cannot address financial problems through bankruptcy, many people will be left without access to basic medical care.  As the boomer population continues to age and require ever more medical care, these problems are likely to get worse and worse.

Coordes convinced me that health care organizations differ from other entities in need of bankruptcy relief.  These bankruptcy misfits have state and federal regulators and patient communities as key stakeholders, making it a challenge for bankruptcy courts charged with maximizing a bankruptcy estate’s financial value to balance competing interests. 

Looking down the road, additional health care bankruptcies appear likely.  And as they mount, the need to put a solid, health-care-specific framework in place to address them will increase. …

When I decided to leave the law firm for a teaching fellowship in hopes that I might one day find a job as a law professor, I had no real clue what I was doing.  I struggled with the decision and the risk, but eventually just decided to go for it, even knowing that the entry-level hiring market was brutal.

One thing that would have helped enormously would have been something like this conference at Villanova.  They’ve put together an incredibly strong group of people to talk about how to do this.  Many of these folks would be great friends and mentors to get to know if you’re going to join this field and community.  They have a registration link here if this is something you’re interested in.

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AALS Section on Professional Responsibility

2020 AALS Annual Meeting

Call for Papers Announcement

The AALS Section on Professional Responsibility invites papers for its program

“Professional Responsibility 2020 Works In Progress Workshop”

at the AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.  

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:

This workshop will be an opportunity for junior scholars to receive substantive critique and feedback on a work in progress.  Each junior scholar will be paired with a more senior scholar in the field who will lead a discussion of the piece and provide feedback. Successful papers should engage with scholarly literature and make a meaningful, original contribution to the field or professional responsibility or legal ethics.

ELIGIBILITY:

Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit papers. Preference will be given to junior scholars focusing their work in the area of professional responsibility and legal ethics. Pursuant to AALS rules, faculty at fee-paid law schools, foreign faculty, adjunct and visiting faculty (without a full-time position at an AALS member law school), graduate students, fellows, and non-law school faculty are not eligible to submit. Please note that all faculty members presenting at the program are responsible for paying their own annual meeting registration fee and…