C. Steven Bradford

Subscribe to C. Steven Bradford's Posts

I recently traveled to far western Texas to backpack in Big Bend National Park. An ice storm hit west Texas shortly before my trip. The ice cleared before I drove out from Dallas, but knocked out the power in the area I was visiting for several days. That power outage taught me several important lessons.

The Resilience of Small Businesses

The power outage demonstrated yet again the resilience of American small businesses. I was amazed at how well, and how quickly, businesses were able to adjust to the loss of power, computers, and the Internet. Those adjustments make life much easier for people like me, stuck in the area with no local support.

It’s obvious to me now, but I never thought about the fact that gas stations can’t pump gas without power. I will forever be grateful to the gentleman who owns the small Fina station in Marathon, Texas. He hooked up a portable generator to one of his gas pumps and hand-pumped gas for people like me who would have been stranded in the middle of nowhere without it. (Marathon, Texas truly is in the middle of nowhere; look it up if you don’t believe me.) He even…

Last week, I gave you a list of the best fiction books I read in 2014. Here’s a list of the best non-law, non-fiction I read in 2014. I hope you find something that interests you. I read much more non-fiction than fiction, so this list is a little longer. As with my list of fiction, they’re in no particular order.

1. Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate. An extremely well-written look at the global shipping industry—not the FedEx and UPS type of shipping, but actual ships. The author traveled over 9,000 miles on a container ship. The book discusses that voyage, interlaced with a boatload of material (pun intended) about the history of shipping, the regulation of shipping, shipwrecks, piracy, and a number of other subjects.

2. Rich Cohen, Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football. I’m neither a Chicago Bears fan nor a Mike Ditka fan, but this was an interesting book. For those who are young and familiar with the current Bears, yes, the Bears actually won back in 1985.

Believe it or not, I and the other editors of the Business Law Prof Blog don’t spend all of our time reading and thinking about business law. I assume none of you do, either, so I thought you might be interested in a list of the best non-law books I have run across this year.

I originally planned to put them all in a single post, but I read a number of very good books in 2014, so I decided to divide the list into two posts. Today, fiction. Next week, non-fiction.

I’m limiting both lists to books published relatively recently, so you don’t have to wade through a list of old science fiction or Thomas Hardy novels, no matter how excellent I thought they were when I reread them this year.

Except for the first book, they’re in no real order.

1. Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See. If you read only one book on this list, this should be it. This is the best new novel I have read in some time. It centers on a bright young German boy and a blind French girl in the period prior to and during World War II.

My co-blogger Haskell Murray had an interesting post last month on curiosity and obedience. He wrote about the natural curiosity of children: “As a professor, I wish I could bottle my son’s curiosity and feed it to my students.” But what exactly is curiosity and how exactly do we encourage it in law students?

I recently read an excellent book on curiosity: Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It, by Ian Leslie. The book has a lot of interesting things to say about education, parenting, life-long learning, creativity, and innovation. I couldn’t possibly do it justice here. But, if you’re interested in learning and education, legal or otherwise, I strongly recommend it.
 
Leslie makes a distinction between diversive curiosity and epistemic curiosity. Diversive curiosity is shallow—wanting to know a particular piece of information. When I check on IMDb for the name of the actress in the movie I’m watching, that’s diversive curiosity. Epistemic curiosity, what we really want to encourage in our kids and our students, is the quest for knowledge and understanding, the desire to address the mysteries that don’t have readily ascertainable answers.

Google is mostly about diversive curiosity, finding answers.

Many people have been talking about the four teams chosen for the inaugural college football playoff. I, good business law blogger that I am, have been thinking about conflicts of interest on the selection committee.

If you’re a football fan, you know that this year, for the first time, the national champion in NCAA major college football will be chosen through a four-team playoff. The four teams selected—Alabama, Oregon, Florida State, and Ohio State—will participate in two semifinal games, with the two winners to play for the championship. (Yes, Art Briles, Baylor should be one of the four, but, no, Ohio State is not the team that shouldn’t be there.)

The four participating schools are chosen by a thirteen-person selection committee, although one of the members, Archie Manning, has taken a leave of absence this year for health reasons. The committee includes several people with current relationships to schools that play major college football, including the following athletic directors:  Jeff Long, Arkansas; Barry Alvarez, Wisconsin; Pat Haden, USC; Oliver Luck, West Virginia; and Dan Radakovich, Clemson.

The selection committee adopted a recusal policy that requires committee members to recuse themselves if the committee member or an immediate…

The end of the semester is here. And, once again, I’m giving my Business Associations students a single, end-of-semester exam that counts for almost all of their grade.

My on-line Accounting for Lawyers class is different. My Accounting students have multiple assignments due each week, and they get feedback from me on each assignment. Those weekly assignments count for 30% of their final grade.

I know what the educational research says: a single end-of-semester evaluation is not as effective in promoting learning as multiple evaluations throughout the semester. My experience with regular assessment in Accounting for Lawyers confirms that. Since I began teaching Accounting for Lawyers this way three years ago, the final exams have been much better. Students are clearly learning more, and they have been rewarded with higher grades than I gave before.

So why do many law professors continue to rely on a single, end-of-semester exam?

Student expectations are a major issue. I have tried multiple exams in the past, but my students didn’t like it. After the first year of law school, they’re used to the end-of-semester format; multiple assessments require them to change their study routines. Assessment throughout the semester also changes the classroom dynamic…

I recently read a very interesting article on legal education, The MIT School of Law? A Perspective on Legal Education in the 21st Century, by Daniel Martin Katz, scheduled to appear in the 2014 U. Ill. L. Rev. 

Katz, an associate professor at Michigan State, considers the impact of the information revolution and changes in the market for legal services on legal education. He considers how a hypothetical law school might market itself and its students. The key, according to Katz, “is to stop trying to be the ‘50th or 100th best Harvard and Yale’ and instead to concentrate on outflanking these and other institutions by becoming leaders in law’s major emerging employment sectors.” Rather than consider how to incrementally change existing law schools, Katz tries to work backward from what he thinks the future market for lawyers will be like to how a law school should be structured to serve that market. Not surprisingly, Katz concludes that knowledge of technology, math, engineering and science will be important for future lawyers—thus, the MIT School of Law in the article’s title.

I’m a little late getting to this, but it’s a very interesting, provocative article—well worth reading. Katz’s article is…

Rule 10b-5(b) makes it unlawful to make false or misleading statements in connection with the purchase or sale of a security. In Janus Capital [Janus Capital Group, Inc. v. First Derivative Traders, — U.S. –, 131 S. Ct. 2296 (2011)], the Supreme Court limited the scope of 10b-5(b) by narrowly defining the term “make.” According to the court, a “maker” for purposes of 10b-5 liability “is the person or entity with ultimate authority over the statement, including its content and whether and how to communicate it.” One is not liable under Rule 10b-5(b) merely because one drafts or publishes a statement for someone else or even if, as in Janus, one posts that other person’s statement on one’s own web site.

Last week, in Prousalis v. Moore, a panel of the Fourth Circuit held that Janus applies only to private rights of action, not to criminal enforcement actions by the government. This interpretation of Janus is wrong. There’s no justifiable reason not to apply the Janus Capital interpretation in criminal cases.

The Fourth Circuit begins by pointing out that Janus involved a private right of action, not a criminal action and the court’s holding is therefore limited to…