Research/Scholarhip

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The Section on Transactional Law & Skills has extended its deadline for paper proposals for its program at the 2022 Annual Meeting to Friday, September 17. Submissions can be sent directly to Megan Shaner at mshaner@ou.edu. I cribbed the following from a message she wrote to the section membership last week.  (Thanks, Megan!)

The topic of the section’s program this year is “Transactional Lawyering at the Intersection of Business and Societal Well-Being” and, according to the preliminary program for the conference, the program is tentatively scheduled for 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. on Friday, January 7, 2022. The first part of the program focuses on how to incorporate ESG issues and impact topics across the transactional curriculum, including in clinics and other experiential courses, as well as in doctrinal courses. The second part of the program consists of scholarly presentations to be selected from the Call for Papers set forth below. If you incorporate ESG, corporate social responsibility, impact investing or governance, or related topics into your scholarship in any way, you should consider submitting your paper in response to the Call for Papers.

CALL FOR PAPERS
AALS SECTION ON TRANSACTIONAL LAW AND SKILLS
Transactional Lawyering at the…

Please note the deadline extensions on the following previously posted calls for papers for the 2022 AALS Annual Meeting.

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Section on Securities Regulation: Open Call for Papers

The AALS Section on Securities Regulation invites submissions for its session at the 2022 annual meeting of the AALS. The annual meeting will be held virtually from January 5-9, 2022, with Section on Securities Regulation panel scheduled for Saturday, January 8 from 12:35-1:50pm. We welcome submissions at any stage of development, although preference may be given to more fully developed papers over abstracts and paper proposals. The submission should relate to the following session description:

Equality and Access in Securities Markets

Recent years have seen increasing attention to issues of equality and access in securities markets. Nasdaq has proposed requiring listed company boards to include at least one female member and one member from an underrepresented minority. The SEC recently amended Regulation S-K to add human capital as a broad topic for disclosure, but declined to require companies to divulge diversity data. In addition to issues relevant to regulated companies, gaps remain in the gender and racial diversity of the SEC’s own commissioners and…

USC Gould School of Law and Lewis & Clark Law School present the inaugural West Coast Bankruptcy Roundtable to be held February 3-4, 2022 in Los Angeles.  Spearheaded by Robert Rasmussen, Michael Simkovic, and Samir Parikh, the Roundtable seeks to bring together experienced and junior scholars to discuss particularly noteworthy scholarship involving financial restructuring and business law.  We seek scholars exploring diverse topics and will be interested in interdisciplinary perspectives.

The Roundtable invites the submission of papers.  Selected participants will receive a $1,000 stipend and have the opportunity to workshop their papers in an intimate, collegial setting.  Current attendees include Barry Adler (NYU), Ken Ayotte (Berkeley), Douglas Baird (Chicago), Bruce Bennett (Jones Day), Mitu Gulati (UVA), Yair Listokin (Yale), Bruce Markell (Northwestern), Ed Morrison (Columbia), Alan Schwartz (Yale), Jamie Sprayregen (Kirkland & Ellis), David Skeel (Penn), and Fred Tung (BU). 

Papers will be selected through a blind review process.  Scholars are invited to submit a 3 – 5 page overview of a proposed paper.  Submissions may be an introduction, excerpt from a longer paper, or extended abstract.  The submission should be anonymized, and – aside from general citations to the author’s previous articles – all references to the author should…

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OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

The Journal of Law and Political Economy is delighted to announce an open call for submissions to Volumes 2 and 3.

WHO WE ARE

JLPE is an online, peer-reviewed journal published three times yearly, supported by the University of California’s eScholarship platform, https://escholarship.org/uc/lawandpoliticaleconomy. As the “house journal” of the pathbreaking Law and Political Economy movement, our sister organizations include ClassCrits, Inc. (classcrits.org), the Law and Political Economy Project (lpeproject.org), and the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and Law (APPEAL, politicaleconomylaw.org). Our Editorial and Advisory Boards consist of distinguished, nationally and internationally known scholars drawn widely from law, the social sciences, and the humanities.

With the conviction that conventional Law and Economics is inadequate to the multiple and overlapping crises of our time, JLPE seeks to promote multi- and interdisciplinary analyses of the mutually constitutive interactions among law, society, institutions, and politics. Our central goal is to explore power in all its manifestations (race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, global inequality, etc.) and the relationship of law to power. Accordingly, JLPE aims to provide an academic and practical resource for, and to foster discussion among, scholars, activists, and educators from countries around the world to…

The planning committee for the National Business Law Scholars Conference has again determined to host a virtual workshop this year (June 17-18). As is the custom, the workshop will consist of several keynote events and many, many moderated paper panels featuring the work of business law scholars who submitted proposals. We are working on finalizing the program now.  Each registrant for the 2021 conference who submitted an accepted proposal will receive a message with additional details. 

As you may recall, the conference this year was scheduled to be held at The University of Tennessee College of Law. We still do hope to hold a future National Business Law Scholars Conference at UT Law in Knoxville–perhaps next June. Stay tuned for more on that at a later time.  However, for those who have a yen to travel out my way this June during the conference (maybe your heart was set on it–or at least on getting out of the house), I am happy to host you in person.  While our campus has various restrictions that would need to be addressed for you to access our buildings, the surrounding area (Knoxville and East Tennessee generally, including the Great Smoky Mountains National Park)…

My friend and colleague Prof. Victoria Haneman has shared her paper, Menstrual Capitalism, Period Poverty, and the Role of the B Corporation.  Here is the abstract: 

A menstruation industrial complex has arisen to profit from the monthly clean-up of uterine waste, and it is interesting to consider the way in which period poverty and menstrual capitalism are opposite sides of the same coin. Given that the average woman will dispose of 200 to 300 pounds of “pads, plugs and applicators” in her lifetime and menstruate for an average of thirty-eight years, this is a marketplace with substantial profit to be reaped even from the marginalized poor. As consciousness of issues such as period poverty and structural gender inequality increases, menstrual marketing has evolved and gradually started to “go woke” through messaging that may or may not be genuine. Companies are profit-seeking and the woke-washing of advertising, or messaging designed to appeal to progressively-oriented sentimentality, is a legitimate concern. Authenticity matters to those consumers who would like to distinguish genuine brand activism from appropriating marketing, but few objective approaches are available to assess authentic commitment.

This Essay considers the profit to be made in virtue signaling solely for the

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“Peer assessment score” – the opinion of deans and certain faculty about the overall quality of a law school – accounts for 25% of a school’s score in the U.S. News ranking. It is the most heavily weighted item. Bar passage, for comparison, is just a bit over 2%. When told this my pre-law students almost inevitably say — “why would I care what deans and faculty at other schools think?”  

Below are the 25 schools that have the lowest peer assessment relative to overall rank and the 25 schools with the highest peer assessment relative to overall rank. Tier 2 schools are not included because they do not have a specific overall rank. TaxProfBlog provided the data. 

I am not unbiased here. I teach in the business school at Belmont University, and our law school has the biggest negative gap between peer assessment and overall rank. There are some reasonable reasons for this gap — e.g., the school is young (the law school founded in 2011, though the university was founded in 1890) and a lot of deans/faculty may not know that the law school is doing well on incoming student credentials, bar passage…

2021 National Business Law Scholars Conference
June 17-18, 2021

The University of Tennessee College of Law
Knoxville, Tennessee

Call for Papers

The National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) will be held on Thursday and Friday, June 17-18, 2021.  The 2021 conference is being hosted by The University of Tennessee College of Law.  The conference will be conducted in a hybrid or online format, as determined by the NBLSC planning committee in the early part of 2021.

This is the twelfth 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.  We expect to be in a position to offer separate programming for aspiring law professors and market entrants, as we have done in the past, likely on a separate date after the conference concludes.

Please use the conference website to submit an abstract or paper by April…

2021 National Business Law Scholars Conference
June 17-18, 2021

The University of Tennessee College of Law
Knoxville, Tennessee

The National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) will be held on Thursday and Friday, June 17-18, 2021.  The 2021 conference is being hosted by The University of Tennessee College of Law.  The conference will be conducted in a hybrid or online format, as determined by the NBLSC planning committee in the early part of 2021.

This is the twelfth 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.  We expect to be in a position to offer separate programming for aspiring law professors and market entrants, as we have done in the past, likely on a separate date after the conference concludes.

Please use the conference website, which will be available at https://law.utk.edu/ in January, to submit an abstract…

This coming spring, I am on sabbatical.

Typically, I teach 4 courses per semester – each with 5 to 8 decent-sized assessments. Among other responsibilities, I am a pre-law advisor for our undergraduate students. So the school year tends to be a bit of blur.

Our fall semester ended just before Thanksgiving, and I already miss teaching. That said, I do feel fortunate to be on sabbatical during what will be another hybrid-teaching semester for us. While hybrid, masked teaching was O.K., it did not hold a candle to typical in-person teaching in my opinion.

In any event, I have my main writing project for the spring (somewhat) mapped out, but would love thoughts on sabbaticals in general for those who have taken them. Some of my plans are a bit uncertain, given the pandemic. In addition to research/writing, a few things I hope to do are – take another Open Yale Course, connect/reconnect with business lawyers/judges in Nashville, and give a few presentations (if COVID allows).

Anyway, feel free to e-mail me here or leave a comment below.