Teaching

Subscribe to Teaching via RSS

I am still basking in the warm glow of having hosted a number of my fellow Business Law Prof Blog editors in Knoxville last week for our second annual “Connecting the Threads” event.  What a great day we had on Friday.  I could listen to these folks talk about business law until the cows come home (so to speak–no actual cows here!).

As BLPB readers may recall, the title of my paper for the 2018 “Connecting the Threads II” symposium is Lawyering for Social Enterprise.  I am sure that I will blog more on that topic in this space later–when my paper from the symposium has been published–but I want to offer here the three paragraphs of conclusion to the handout I prepared for the continuing legal education materials for the program, which focus on the need of judgment, discretion, and even wisdom.

Advising entrepreneurs, founders, promoters, and directors of social enterprises can be both satisfying and frustrating. The satisfaction most often comes from helping these businesses achieve financial success while also serving the public good. The frustration comes from the difficulty of the task in providing the necessary counsel—both in selecting the optimal legal form for the…

Did I lose you with the title to this post? Do you have no idea what a DAO is? In its simplest terms, a DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization, whose decisions are made electronically by a written computer code or through the vote of its members. In theory, it eliminates the need for traditional documentation and people for governance. This post won’t explain any more about DAOs or the infamous hack of the Slock.it DAO in 2016. I chose this provocative title to inspire you to read an article entitled Legal Education in the Blockchain Revolution.

The authors Mark Fenwick, Wulf A. Kaal, and Erik P. M. Vermeulen discuss how technological innovations, including artificial intelligence and blockchain will change how we teach and practice law related to real property, IP, privacy, contracts, and employment law. If you’re a practicing lawyer, you have a duty of competence. You need to know what you don’t know so that you avoid advising on areas outside of your level of expertise. It may be exciting to advise a company on tax, IP, securities law or other legal issues related to cryptocurrency or blockchain, but you could subject yourself to discipline for doing so…

Two weeks ago, I blogged about why lawyers, law professors, and judges should care about blockchain. I’ll be speaking about blockchain, corporate governance, and enterprise risk management on September 14th at our second annual BLPB symposium at UT. To prepare, I’m reading as many articles as I can on blockchain, but it can be a bit mind numbing with all of the complexity. After hearing Carla Reyes speak at SEALS, I knew I had to read hers, if only because of the title If Rockefeller Were A Coder.

I recommend this article in general, but especially for those who teach business organizations and want to find a way to enliven your entity selection discussions. The abstract is below. 

The Ethereum Decentralized Autonomous Organization (“The DAO”), a decentralized, smart contract-based, investment fund with assets of $168 million, spectacularly crashed when one of its members exploited a flaw in the computer code and stole $55 million. In the wake of the exploit, many argued that participants in the DAO could be jointly and severally liable for the loss as partners in a general partnership. Others claimed that the DAO evidenced an entirely new form of business entity, one that current laws

…

We’re a month away from our second annual Business Law Professor Blog CLE, hosted at the University of Tennessee on Friday, September 14, 2018. We’ll discuss our latest research and receive comments from UT faculty and students. I’ve entitled my talk Beyond Bitcoin: Leveraging Blockchain for Corporate Governance, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Enterprise Risk Management, and will blog more about that after I finish the article. This is a really long post, but it’s chock full of helpful links for novices and experts alike and highlights some really interesting work from our colleagues at other law schools.

Two weeks ago, I posted some resources to help familiarize you with blockchain. Here’s a relatively simple definition from John Giordani at Forbes:

Blockchain is a public register in which transactions between two users belonging to the same network are stored in a secure, verifiable and permanent way. The data relating to the exchanges are saved inside cryptographic blocks, connected in a hierarchical manner to each other. This creates an endless chain of data blocks — hence the name blockchain — that allows you to trace and verify all the transactions you have ever made. The primary function of a…

The University of Miami School of Law seeks entry-level and tenured candidates to join our intellectual community beginning in the 2019-2020 academic year. While these faculty hires are open to a variety of teaching and scholarly interests, the Law School has particular needs in Environmental Law and Business Law.
 
The Law School is committed to diversity of all kinds in its faculty, students, and staff and encourages applications from candidates who will increase the diversity of the Miami Law community.  The University of Miami is an Equal Opportunity Employer that does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, disability, religion, age, status in the uniformed services of the United States (including veteran status), marital status, status as a victim of domestic violence, citizenship status, genetic predisposition, carrier status, or any other classification protected under federal, state, or local law.
 
Entry-level applicants are encouraged to use the AALS submission process to apply.  Lateral applicants may submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, draft work-in-progress, and teaching evaluations (if available) in PDF format to Professor Drew Dawson, Chair, Faculty Appointments Committee, at adawson@law.miami.edu.

Had I not been taking pictures on the beach during a morning walk with dear college friends on the New England shoreline, I would not have seen the incoming call on my silenced cell phone–a call from a business law colleague from UT Law that I figured I ought to answer.  But the call was not, as I expected, a request for help with a research or teaching question.  Instead, this colleague was calling to inform me of an email message from our Dean letting us know that our junior business law colleague, Jonathan Rohr, had died the day before.  (I am linking here to a YouTube video featuring Jonathan, which will tell you much more about the man that he was than any CV or website.)

Jonathan came into my life almost two years ago when he interviewed with UT Law for a permanent, tenure track position after VAP-ing at his law alma mater, Cardozo.  From the start, Jonathan impressed me and others on the Appointments Committee with his intellect, his enthusiasm for the faculty task, and his intensity.  He survived the appointments tournament and came to work with us last summer.  Before his untimely death, he already…

I received the following today through the AALS teaching listserv.  It may be of interest to some of you or to folks you may know in the region.

++++++++++++++

Dear Friends:

I am happy to report that the UC Davis School of Law is offering a mandatory skills course for 1Ls starting in Spring 2019. It will include segments on negotiation and client interviewing. If you are in northern California, or plan to be January through March 2019, I hope you will consider applying for one of the six adjunct positions relating to this exciting new course. Information here: https://recruit.ucdavis.edu/apply/JPF02281

Donna Shestowsky, J.D., Ph.D.
Director of Lawyering Skills Education
Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law
Martin Luther King Jr. Research Scholar
Affiliated Faculty, Department of Psychology, UC Davis
dshest@ucdavis.edu
Phone: (530) 754-5693
My latest research, published in the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, can be found here:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2945706

It was great to see co-blogger Marcia Narine Weldon (albeit briefly) at the Sixth Biennial Conference: To Teach is to Learn Twice: Fostering Excellence in Transactional Law and Skills Education hosted by Emory Law’s Center for Transactional Law and Practice.  I had the opportunity to present and attend some of the presentations on Friday.  I had to leave Saturday morning to teach Contract Law to ProMBA students in Knoxville Saturday afternoon, however, and missed hearing half the conference program as a result.  Even on Friday, due to the number of super concurrent sessions, I had to forego a lot of great presentations.  Consequently, I was delighted to read Marcia’s post on Tina Stark’s presentation.  Great stuff.

At the conference, I offered insights on my document “treasure hunt” teaching method in a “try this” session on Friday afternoon.  More specifically, I talked about and demonstrated a corporate finance treasure hunt.  After laying a substantive and practical foundation, I sent the audience, some of whom are not corporate finance folks, on a search for blank check preferred stock provisions in Delaware corporate charters.  Then, I called on them to share their search logic and make observations about what they found, relating their treasure…

Greetings from Atlanta, Georgia, site of the Emory Transactional Law & Skills Conference. After only a few hours of presentations, I’m already inspired to make some changes in my new transactional lawyering class. I will write about some of the lessons learned next week. Today, I want to share some of Tina Stark’s remarks from the conference dinner that ended moments ago. Although she initially teased the audience by stating that she would make “subversive” statements, nothing that she said would scandalize most law students or surprise practicing lawyers.

Her “radical” proposal entailed having transactional skills education be a part of every law student’s curriculum. In support, she cited ABA Standard 301(a), which states:

OBJECTIVES OF PROGRAM OF LEGAL EDUCATION (a) A law school shall maintain a rigorous program of legal education that prepares its students, upon graduation, for admission to the bar and for effective, ethical, and responsible participation as members of the legal profession.

She argued that for the academy to meet this standard, schools must go beyond a narrow reading of ABA rules and provide every student with the foundation to practice transactional law, particularly because half of graduates will practice in that area even if they don’t know…

I am committed to introducing my business law students to business law doctrine and policy both domestically and internationally.  The Business Associations text that I coauthored has comparative legal observations in most chapters.  I have taught Cross-Border Mergers & Acquisitions with a group of colleagues and will soon be publishing a book we have coauthored.  And I taught comparative business law courses for four years in study abroad programs in Brazil and the UK.  

In the study abroad programs, I struggled in finding suitable texts, cobbling together several relatively small paperbacks and adding some web-available materials.  The result was suboptimal.  I yearned for a single suitable text.  In my view, texts for study abroad courses should be paperback and cover all of the basics in the field in a succinct fashion, allowing for easy portability and both healthy discussion to fill gaps and customization, as needed, to suit the instructor’s teaching and learning objectives.

And so it was with some excitement–but also some healthy natural skepticism–that I requested a review copy of Corporations: A Comparative Perspective (International Edition), coauthored by my long-time friend Marco Ventoruzzo (Bocconi and Penn State) and five others (all scholars from outside…