On behalf of all the Credit Slips bloggers, I would like to welcome Professor Emily Kadens as a guest blogger to these pages. Professor Kadens is at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, and she specializes in European legal history and commercial law. Currently, she is working on the history of bankruptcy in pre-modern England and France. I had the pleasure of listening to Professor Kadens provide a lunchtime lecture at a conference I attended a few months back and immediately hoped that she would share her perspectives with the Credit Slips audience. We were all thrilled when she agreed. Professor Kadens has a law degree and an M.A. from the University of Chicago, a Ph.D. in history from Princeton, and a diploma in medieval studies from the Université Catholique de Louvain. She has just finished her second year on the faculty at UT, but we’re all  looking forward to her academic contributions for years to come. This week, Professor Kadens will give us insightful historical perspectives on the subjects that are near and dear to our heart here on Credit Slips.