I just came back on Sunday from the 2024 Law and Society Association Annual Meeting in Denver.  It was, as always, a stimulating few days.  A number of us business law profs were in attendance.  The corporate and securities law collaborative research network (CRN46) habitually organizes several programs.  This year was no exception.  I was privileged to be featured in two.  But I will say more on my participation in the conference later.

Today, I want to highlight an interesting piece that was presented at the conference during one of the CRN46 paper panels: “The Original Meaning of Equity “ by Asaf Raz (forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review).  The SSRN abstract follows:

Equity is seeing a new wave of attention in scholarship and practice. Yet, as this Article argues, our current understanding of equity is divided between two distinct meanings: on one side, the federal courts, guided by the Supreme Court, tend to discuss equity as the precise set of remedies known at a fixed point in the past (static equity). On the other, state courts—most prominently, in Delaware—administer equity to preserve the correct operation of law in unforeseeable situations (substantive equity). Only the latter

Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law recently published the proceedings of the 2023 Business Law Prof Blog symposium, held at UT Law in Knoxville back in October.  The proceedings can be found here.  As is customary, the issue includes articles written by the principal presenters—bloggers from here at the BLPB—and related commentary from UT Law faculty and students.

My contribution to the symposium was a piece called Business Lawyer Leadership: Valuing Relationships.  The abstract is set forth below.

Business lawyers are surrounded by relationships because of the nature of their work. Businesses are relational; business associations law is relational; business lawyering is relational. Business lawyering, in all its manifestations, is a practice steeped in the lawyer’s awareness and management of, as well as their participation in, the layered sets of relationships found in businesses and business associations law.

This article recognizes these important connections between business law practice and relationships. It approaches each of them in turn. The substantial take-away is that a business lawyer can best lead by understanding the inherent value of relationships to business lawyering and leveraging that understanding through focused effort that includes the employment of, among other things, relationship management skills. Relationship

At Emory Law’s Eighth Biennial Conference on the Teaching of Transactional Skills back in the fall of 2023, I had the privilege of presenting with my UT Law clinical teaching colleague, Brian Krumm.  (Congratulations are due to Brian, who was recently appointed the Interim Director of our Clayton Center for Entrepreneurial Law!)  The title of this post is also the title of our presentation.  An edited transcript of the presentation was recently published by Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law and can be found here. The abstract is as follows:

In this edited transcript, we explain how each of us–a doctrinal law professor and a clinician–use members of our campus and local communities to help instruct transactional business law students. We each have independently realized that there is a value to sharing these outside business and legal experts with our students. Among other things, we have found that we can bring unique areas of legal and business expertise into our teaching and, at the same time, introduce our students to real-life practice experiences and related simulations. All of this is foundational to law practice. In addition, experiences of this kind are, in our view, increasingly useful and

I’m delighted to share that I’ll be presenting this Friday at the SMU Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources Colloquium.  Anyone interested in attending can register here.  A description of the event is below.  I’m excited to be working on my third (one and two) article with SMU energy law Professor James W. Coleman. It’s at the intersection of energy and financial regulation, and I look forward to sharing more about it with readers soon!  I’m particularly grateful to co-blogger Joan Heminway and the University of Tennessee Law School for hosting the Connecting the Threads CLE series, the forum in which we first shared our initial papers! 

Description

The SMU Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources Colloquium is an annual program, in its second year, which focuses on the interdisciplinary connections between the fields of energy, environment, and natural resources (“EENR”). It promises to be a pivotal gathering for academics, students, practitioners, and other stakeholders in the fields of law, science, engineering, business, and the humanities. The conference will delve into crucial topics like environmental justice initiatives, natural resource management using law and markets, carbon management, and interdisciplinary solutions to environmental challenges, featuring a mix of

Please note that the deadline for submission of proposals for the National Business Law Scholars Conference has been extended to April 1!  The revised Call for Papers follows.  I hope to see many of you there.

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 National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) 
June 24-25, 2024 
Call for Papers 

The National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) will be held on Monday and Tuesday, June 24-25, 2024, at The University of California, Davis School of Law. 

This is the fifteenth meeting of the NBLSC, an annual conference that draws legal scholars from across the United States and around the world. We welcome all scholarly submissions relating to business law. Junior scholars and those considering entering the academy are especially encouraged to participate. If you are thinking about entering the academy and would like to receive informal mentoring and learn more about job market dynamics, please let us know when you make your submission. 

Submission Guidelines: 

Please fill out this form to register and submit an abstract by Monday, April 1, 2024. Please be prepared to include in your submission the following information about you and your work: 

Name 

Sometimes, the scholarly enterprise offers one the opportunity to deeply learn while sharing embedded knowledge.  I never thought that my 2022 Southeastern Association of Law Schools discussion group on Elon Musk and the Law would turn into such a rich learning experience.  But it did.  

In organizing the group, I knew folks would focus on all things Twitter (especially as the year proceeded).  But because of the kind offer of the Stetson Law Review to host a symposium featuring the work of the group and publish the proceedings, I was able to dig in a bit deeper in my work, which focused on visioning what it would be like to represent Elon Musk.  The resulting article, “Representing Eline Musk,” can be found here.  The SSRN abstract follows.

What would it be like to represent Elon Musk on business law matters or work with him in representing a business he manages or controls? This article approaches that issue as a function of professional responsibility and practice norms applied in the context of publicly available information about Elon Musk and his business-related escapades. Specifically, the article provides a sketch of Elon Musk and considers that depiction through a professional conduct lens

If you happen to be in Miami or think it’s worth it to fly there next week, this is for you. I’ll be moderating the panel on regulatory considerations for promoters and influencers and we have student teams competing from all over the country. 

February 29 – March 1
University of Miami

Content is king. We live in the golden age where content creators, artists, and influencers wield power and can shift culture. Brands want to collaborate. Creators need to be sophisticated, understand deal points and protect their brand and intellectual property. Miami Law will be the first law school in the country to pull together law students with leading lawyers, influencers, artists, creatives and trendsetters for a negotiation competition and conference.  

Negotiation Competition – Thursday, February 29 

Where

Shalala Student Center, 1330 Miller Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146

Who Should Participate

This competition is ideal for law and business students. THE. TEAMS ARE FINALIZED ALREADY.

What to Expect

Participants will have the chance to represent influencers, brands, artists, fashion companies and other creators in the first ever Counseling Creators: Influencers, Artists and Trendsetters Negotiation Competition

  • Register a team of law students (can include business school students)
    1. Team of

Dear BLPB Readers:

For those of you who might be interested in strengthening your knowledge of empirical methods, Northwestern Law School is offering two summer workshops on Research Design for Causal Inference.  An overview of the main workshop and its target audience is below.  The complete details of the main and advanced workshops are here.

“Main Workshop Overview

We will cover the design of true randomized experiments and contrast them to natural or quasi experiments and to pure observational studies, where part of the sample is treated, the remainder is a control group, but the researcher controls neither which units are treated vs. control, nor administration of the treatment. We will assess the causal inferences one can draw from specific “causal” research designs, threats to valid causal inference, and research designs that can mitigate those threats.

Most empirical methods courses survey a variety of methods. We will begin instead with the goal of causal inference, and how to design a research plan to come closer to that goal, using messy, real-world datasets with limited sample sizes. The methods are often adapted to a particular study.

Target Audience

Quantitative empirical researchers (faculty and graduate students) in social science, including law

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I have the privilege and honor to be in Detroit today to present the second annual Baiardi lecture at Wayne State University Law School.  Wayne Law is a bit of a second home for me (a status it enjoys with several other law schools).  I have presented at two symposia here (publishing twice, as a result, with the Wayne Law Review).  Also, Wayne Law was the academic pied à terre of Peter Henning, who was a trusted and dear mentor (and an accomplice in reasoning through insider trading and applied corporate governance questions) until his untimely death.

My lecture addresses aspects of a joint project I previewed at the National Business Law Scholars Conference at Tennessee Law last June.  The project is the brainchild of my Tennessee Law colleague Tomer Stein and involves taking a new approach to the ongoing debate about federalizing corporate law.  The talk offers some practical applied thoughts on the project and is entitled “Visioning (Not Advocating or Discounting) Federal Corporate Law.” I undoubtedly will have more to say on this topic as our work on the project progresses.  But if you think of or come across anything you deem relevant to the cause