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I was fortunate to run into my friend Pamela Foohey at a reception at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting last week. I had known that the book on consumer bankruptcy she coauthored (with Robert Lawless and Deborah Thorne) had been released. But I had not yet read it. I was especially lucky to catch Pamela that night when she had a copy of the book with her. After a brief conversation, she was kind enough to offer it to me. I began reading it on the flight home. So far, it is an illuminating and fascinating read. 

The book I am referencing, Debt’s Grip, reports on the most recent iteration of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project. For those who may be unfamiliar with the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, it is a long-term (now over 40 years in duration), periodic review of consumer bankruptcies. This most recent study involves the reporting and analysis of eleven years of data assembled from bankruptcy case files and surveys of the related households. While some of the takeaways are unsurprising, the book’s documentation of the nature the filers, their cases, and the outcomes paints a compelling picture of the greater socioeconomic environment…

image from siliconflatirons.org

Friend-of-the-BLPB Andrew Schwartz has written his first book on a topic about which we both enjoy thinking and researching and writing: investment crowdfunding.  We have been cohabiting this corporate finance space for more than ten years now.  All credit is due to Andrew for laying down these words—his hard-fought wisdom—in a book.  He captures so much about the law and regulation of crowdfunding in the investment context in this volume.  I had the opportunity to offer some feedback to Andrew during the drafting process.   I recommend having the book on your bookshelves.

Colorado Law is hosting an event on its campus in Boulder on September 8, The Future of Startup Finance: A Symposium on “Investment Crowdfunding”, honoring the release of the book, which is entitled Investment Crowdfunding.  If you are in the neighborhood, you’ll want to stop by.  Among the invited speakers are many friends from the corporate finance law academy, as well as former SEC Commissioner Allison Herren Lee.

Congrats to Andrew!

If you happen to be traveling in the region of Knoxville, Tennessee on Thursday or Friday, feel free to stop by and catch all or part of this year’s National Business Law Scholars Conference, hosted by the Clayton Center for Entrepreneurial Law at The University of Tennessee College of Law.  The final schedule will be posted on the conference website within the next day, but I can tell you now that we start at 8:15 am for breakfast on Thursday (9:15 am for the program) and run through a 5:30 pm reception, and we start at at 8:00 am for breakfast on Friday (8:45 am for the program) and run until 3:30 pm. We have, as usual, a number of engaging plenary programs, but the conference mostly consists of scholarly paper panels.  As always, the schedule has been produced by the incomparable Eric Chaffee (who is moving to Case Western Law this summer).  He is amazing.

The morning plenaries (which start the conference proceedings each day) focus on entrepreneurship, a topic of focus for and strength of The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and The University of Tennessee College of Law, working through our Transactional Law Clinic.  Thursday’s…

Friend-of-the-BLPB Walter Effross recently informed me of his blog, Keeping Your Own Counsel (subtitled “Simple Strategies and Secrets for Success in Law School”). The blog is a companion piece to Walter’s new book designed for pre-law and law students, also entitled Keeping Your Own Counsel. Walter let me know that one can check out the book’s table of contents, preface, and first two chapters through Amazon’s “Look inside” feature and that a summary of six of the book’s themes is in his most recent blog post.

He also noted that his February 25th blog post provides links to his conversations with leading in-house and outside counsel about the definition and goals of, career opportunities in, and ways to remain current on, the increasingly relevant practice of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) law.  He specifically recommends one of those conversations–the one with Fox Rothschild LLP partner David Colvin–even to law students who are not specifically interested in ESG because it addresses practical ethical issues.  He indicated (and I agree) that the overall post may be of particular interest to our readers.  So many of us are focused on ESG and related regulation in our work at the moment .

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(Some neighborhood children playing duck-duck-goose in our common space on July 4th.)

Recently, I finished philosopher David McPherson’s book The Virtues of Limits published by Oxford University Press this year. While I disagree with McPherson in certain areas, I highly recommend his book. I was reacting to the book with friends and the author before I even completed it. Perhaps it would have been best to refrain from commenting until I had finished, but it was a sign that the book was quite thought-provoking. The book was well-written and accessible, even to a non-philosopher like me. 

Given that this post only has a loose connection to business law, I will place the remainder of my thoughts below the page break. 

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Recently, I published a short piece for the Nashville Institute for Faith and Work (NIFW) about Business Ethics in a Pandemic.

As mentioned there, I have found teaching Business Ethics courses extremely challenging, but important. While law can be unclear, the boundaries of business ethics are even more vague. 

Perhaps it is simply because one of my younger brothers is an English professor, but I have been increasingly drawn to using literature in the teaching of business ethics as a way to grapple with the lack of clarity.

So far, I have used the fiction and poetry of Derrick Bell, Wendell Berry, Octavia Butler, Anton Chekov, Ross Gay, Ursula Le Guin, Cormac McCarthy, Mary Oliver, Ranier Maria Rilke, May Sarton, George Saunders, and Leo Tolstoy. Admittedly, this is a bit of an odd mix, but I think each of these writers have something important to say, even if I do not use each of them every semester. 

I remain open to other suggestions, and I plan to rotate in other authors as I continue to teach our business ethics course. (I also hope to write a few longer pedagogy articles in the law & literature and ethics & literature…

Earlier this month, I came across a fun Wall Street Journal article, “Great Novels About Business: How Much Do You Know?” The article got me thinking about business-themed novels more generally. What are the greatest all-time novels about business? I came across another, related article from Inc.com that offers the following list of the 10 best classic novels about business:

  1. The Financier by Theodore Dreiser
  2. The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan
  3. The Magnificent Ambersons by Both Tarkington
  4. The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
  5. The Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
  6. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
  7. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  8. JR by William Gaddis
  9. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
  10. Nice Work by David Lodge

I have to admit that I’ve yet to read a few of these books, and I plan to add them to my summer reading list. But I’m also surprised to find at least one book missing, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  How could we leave Scrooge, Marley, and old Fezziwig off the list….. 

“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faultered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind…

In 2013, acclaimed short-story writer George Saunders gave a commencement speech on kindness at Syracuse University. The speech went viral, the transcript landed on The New York Times blog, and the talk later became the basis of a book. 

The entire speech is well worth listening to, but the gist is Saunders saying: “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.”

Oxford English Dictionary defines “kindness” as “the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.”

When I think of the profession of law, “kindness,” “friendly,” “generous,” and “considerate” are sadly not among the first words that come to mind. “Analytical,” “bold,” “competitive,” “critical,” and “justice” were the first five words I would use to describe our field. 

As C.S. Lewis reportedly said, “love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness,” but I am not sure love is ever less than kindness. There may be ways, as negotiation theory teaches us, to “be soft on the person, but hard on the problem.” We can tackle injustice with vigor, but be mindful of the people across the tables from us. 

Pre-pandemic, I put a real premium on “tough love” and preparing students for the …

I begin teaching again on Wednesday.  The past few weeks have been occupied with course preparation as well as catching up on editing, writing, and other tasks abandoned during a month+ focused on the grading period, attentiveness to  a downturn in my dad’s health, Christmas, a nasty cold, and intensive physical therapy.  As I have focused on the spring semester, I continue to be concerned about helping to teach my students critical and intensive thinking, in and outside legal reasoning.  On this day honoring the life and many legacies of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I am inspired in my work by this passage from his writing–specifically, Chapter 1 of Strength to Love (1963; Pocket Book ed. 1964):

 . . . The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false. The tough-minded individual is astute and discerning. He has a strong austere quality that makes for firmness of purpose and solidness of commitment.

Who doubts that this toughness is one of man’s greatest needs? Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and…

In previous blogs (here and here), I’ve highlighted the wonderful negotiation materials that George Siedel, Professor Emeritus of Business Law at the University of Michigan, has created and generously made available free of charge (here).  I’ll be using his House on Elm Street negotiation once again this fall in my MBA course! 

Today, I wanted to call BLPB readers’ attention to his new book: Seven Essentials for Business Success: Lessons from Legendary Professors.  I’m really excited to read it, especially because my dissertation advisor, G. Richard Shell, the Thomas Gerrity Professor, Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics and Management at Wharton, is one of the seven award-winning professors profiled!  Without doubt, Richard is a truly legendary professor from whom I’ve already learned so much.  I look forward to learning more from him and from the additional six professors highlighted in the book.  Once I finish reading it, I’ll be sure to share some of my favorite takeaways.   

Here’s Amazon’s description:

Successful leaders are great teachers, and successful teachers serve as models of leadership. This book enables both leaders and teachers to understand and use the best practices developed by award-winning professors…