Conferences

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I used to joke that my alma mater Columbia University’s core curriculum, which required students to study the history of art, music, literature, and philosophy (among other things) was designed solely to make sure that graduates could distinguish a Manet from a Monet and not embarrass the university at cocktail parties for wealthy donors. I have since tortured my son by dragging him through museums and ruins all over the world pointing spouting what I remember about chiaroscuro and Doric columns. He’s now a freshman at San Francisco Art Institute, and I’m sure that my now-fond memories of class helped to spark a love of art in him. I must confess though that as a college freshman I was less fond of  Contemporary Civilization class, (“CC”) which took us through Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Hume, Hegel, and all of the usual suspects. At the time I thought it was boring and too high level for a student who planned to work in the gritty city counseling abused children and rape survivors.

Fast forward twenty years or so, and my job as a Compliance and Ethics Officer for a Fortune 500 company immersed me in many of the principles…

Below is a call for papers that I received by e-mail earlier today.  

RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM: CALL FOR PAPERS

Law and Ethics of Big Data

April 17 & 18, 2015

Indiana University- Bloomington, IN.

Abstract Submission Deadline: January 17, 2015

A research colloquium, “Law and Ethics of Big Data,” co-hosted by Professor Angie Raymond of Indiana University and Janine Hiller of Virginia Tech, is sponsored by the Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics in the Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech; the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University; and the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions at Indiana University.

Up to six invitations for research presentation slots will be extended based on this call for papers. In order to receive consideration, researchers are invited to submit an abstract by January 17, 2015.

The following announcement comes to us from Alicia Plerhoples (Georgetown).  The 14th annual transactional clinic conference will be held at UMKC School of Law in Kansas City, Missouri and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is serving as a host partner. Proposals are due by December 15, 2014 and more information about the conference is available after the break.

14TH ANNUAL TRANSACTIONAL CLINICAL CONFERENCE

CALL FOR PROPOSALS, PAPERS, & PANELISTS

Teaching and Writing Methods of the Transactional Clinician

This year’s conference theme is Teaching and Writing Methods of the Transactional Clinician. The conference will have two tracks: (1) a “Nuts & Bolts” Teacher Workshop and (2) a “Pen & Paper” Scholarship Workshop. The Planning Committee seeks proposals for (1) presentations, (2) papers, and (3) panelists as outlined below.   

The below is from an e-mail I received earlier this week about an impact investment legal symposium on October 2, 2014 from 8:30 a.m. to noon (eastern):

Bingham, in conjunction with the International Transactions Clinic of the University of Michigan Law School, Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) Legal Working Group and Impact Investing Legal Working Group, is proud to present a legal symposium on Building a Legal Community of Practice to Add Still More Value to Impact Investments.

The symposium will be held at Bingham McCutchen LLP’s New York offices at 339 Park Avenue or you can attend virtually by registering here.

The panelists include Deborah Burand (Michigan), Jonathan Ng (Ashoka), Keren Raz (Paul Weiss), and many others.   

Call for Papers

ITEM 6 – Tunis, Tunisia

Microfinance: Coaching, Counting, and Crowding

The Banque Populaire Chair in Microfinance of the Burgundy School of Business (France) and l’École supérieure du commerce de Tunis jointly organize the 6th edition of the annual conference “Institutional and Technological Environment of Microfinance” (ITEM) in March 2015 (17, 18, 19) in Tunis, Tunisia.

The 6th edition brings together–but not limited to-three major issues, which are shaping the sector of microfinance: Coaching, Counting, and Crowding.

Coaching in microfinance provides training in business and soft skills (attributes enhancing an individual’s interactions and self-performance) that the poor micro-entrepreneurs rarely have. Increasingly, microfinance academics and practitioners consider building the human capital of micro-entrepreneurs a critical ingredient of moving out of poverty.

Counting and tracking the microfinance clients and prospects with the information technologies not only lessen information asymmetry, but also lower the transaction cost of financial intermediation. Corollary: information technologies can open ways for offering financial services to the poor as a normal way of doing and extending normal business, and accelerate their social integration. 

Crowding, based on the Web 2.0 technologies, enables direct interactions between millions of lending and borrowing people. Through crowdfunding, micro and…

Over at PrawfsBlawg, on a post comparing the SEALS and AALS conferences, an anonymous commenter questioned the value of academic conferences.

In this economic environment, many schools are tightening their belts.  A number of schools have made cuts to funds for travel and professional development. 

Below, I list some of the areas in which conferences can provide benefits. 

Teaching.  At most conferences I attend, I attend at least one panel on pedagogy.  In addition, many of the panels provide new material for classes.  Also, fellow professors may be more willing to share teaching materials, which can be invaluable, if they have met you in person at a conference.

Service.  Conferences are often the hub for discipline-related service.  Many, if not most, of my external service opportunities have come from other professors I met at conferences.

Research.  You can receive excellent comments on your papers at conferences and are much more likely to get other professors to review your work if you have met them in person.  Also, a number of the people who have cited my work are people I met at conferences.  

Professional Development.  Much of our time as professors is spent with students…

Ah, yes . . . .  The public/private divide . . . .  My co-blogger Ann Lipton fairly begged me to write about this topic today, given that she had to miss the discussion session on the subject (entitled “Does The Public/Private Divide In Federal Securities Regulation Make Sense?”) convened by me and Michael Guttentag at last week’s Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) annual conference.  Arm-twisting aside, however, this is a topic of current interest (and actively engaged scholarship) for me.

The discussion session allowed a bunch of our corporate and securities law colleagues to explore historical, present, and projected future distinctions between public and private offerings and public and private companies/firms.  The discussion ranged widely, as did the short papers submitted by the participants.  Some topics of conversation were oriented in part toward corporate governance concerns–comments from Lisa Fairfax on linkages to shareholder empowerment and from Jill Fisch on executive compensation in the post-Dodd-Frank public environment come to mind in this regard.  Other discussion topics engaged securities regulation more centrally, including by, e.g., questioning the coherence of the rationale underlying the Section 12(g) and 15(d) reporting thresholds (with interesting commentary from Amanda Rose and Usha Rodrigues); offering…

The following paragraph is an excerpt from Micro-Symposium on Competing Theories of Corporate Governance, 62 UCLA L. Rev. Disc. 66, which can be found online (here) and is also available via Westlaw.

On Friday, April 11, and Saturday, April 12, 2014, the UCLA School of Law Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy sponsored a conference on competing theories of corporate governance…. This conference provided a venue for distinguished legal scholars to define the competing models, critique them, and explore their implications for various important legal doctrines. In addition to an oral presentation, each conference participant was invited to contribute a very brief essay of up to 750 words (inclusive of footnotes) on their topic to this micro-symposium being published by the UCLA Law Review’s online journal, Discourse. These essays provide a concise but powerful overview of the current state of corporate governance thinking….

The included essays:

  • Stephen M. Bainbridge, An Abridged Case For Director Primacy
  • George S. Georgiev, Shareholder vs. Investor Primacy in Federal Corporate Governance
  • David Millon, Team Production Theory: A Critical Appreciation
  • Usha Rodrigues, David and Director Primacy
  • Stefan J. Padfield , Citizens United, Concession Theory and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

…

Wharton

Below is a call for abstracts from Professor Amy Sepinwall (Wharton).

———————–

Call for Abstracts for the Normative Business Ethics Workshop Series of the Carol and Lawrence Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research:

Over the 2014-2015 academic year, the Carol and Lawrence Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, will be convening a regular works-in-progress series for scholars working in normative business ethics (NBE).

Workshop Objectives:

The series is part of an effort to foster, and increase the prominence of, normative business ethics in the academy and the public sphere. This particular initiative has two key objectives: First, it endeavors to provide a regular forum for scholars working on business ethics from a normative perspective. The community of such scholars is relatively small, and dispersed across numerous institutions, and there are few opportunities for these individuals to convene and share work. This series is an effort to connect these scholars, and enrich their shared intellectual life. Second, the series aims to be especially valuable to junior faculty, by providing them with feedback from, and opportunities to interact with, more established members of the normative business ethics community. To that end, we hope to have one junior…

Many of us are in the process of (perhaps frantically) wrapping up our summer scholarly activity and re-focusing our primary professional attention on teaching.  As always, I am using the annual conference sponsored by the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) to help me make this transition.  Yesterday, I attended a discussion session led by law school associate deans and faculty who focus on faculty development–scholarship and teaching.  It was an incredibly interesting and wide-ranging discussion.

Part of the conversation centered around summer research stipends, a topic that has been in the national news a bit over the past few years.  Various participants in the discussion session addressed, each from his or her individual institution’s vantage point, the reasons for/purposes of summer research stipends (which not every school represented at the session currently has) and how summer stipends actually work or should/could optimally work.  I was surprised by the variations in approaches and ideas from school to school.  While the individual models are too numerous to capture here, I summarize below the fold some of the top-level points made and thoughts shared during the discussion.