The summer reading "contest" has attracted several entries; I’ll be summarizing them in another week, so last call to contribute a book or article on a corporate or consumer credit topic in the next few days. Please make your suggestion as a comment to this post and I’ll aggregate everything. The best part of this blog is the great ideas that our readers give to us, so I hope you’ll share a new or favorite reading, whether a novel, article, news story, or book.
John Pottow offers the following list of three suggestions, which I’ve put below. I’ve already mailed him his prize of Garfield stickers for the being an overachiever and sending in three entries.
1) Jim Hawkins, who previously co-authored a piece with Ronald Mann on payday lenders, has a great working paper on the rent-to-own industry that explores the dynamics of that industry and reports on interesting interviews that he conducted with executives.
2) Lynn LoPucki and JJ White are having a great back-and-forth in a volume of the Michigan Law Review that is forthcoming this year on Lynn’s paper co-authored with Joseph Doherty on "fire sales" that suggests that outcomes from sales under section 363 of the Bankruptcy Code are much lower (based on measures such as return on pre-bankruptcy assets) than traditional reorganizations. JJ’s response, in part, is that Lynn suffers a selection bias pertaining to certain telecom firms as well as a measurement problem in what he includes in his valuation measures (and with his adjustments, finds that Lynn’s effects may point the other way!)
3) "You Asked For It, You Got It . . . Toy Yoda: Practical Jokes, Prizes, and Contract Law" by Keith Rowley, 3 Nev. L. Rev. 526. (2003) (Speaks for itself–great title).
Comments
7 responses to “Update on Summer Reading”
Trollope’s “Last Chronicle of Barset” has an interesting portrait of a business man whose gold isn’t really and whose business fails in a way we can all recognize, and that is just a fairly minor character in a terrific book.
Anything concerning Yukos – fraud, murder, laundering, old style Soviet Siberian jails, US bankruptcy vs. Russian Bankruptcy – funny, sad, drama, comedy, tragedy. . .
Oh, come on now, John. There’s no selection bias. JJ just points out that if you ditched the seven sales (out of 25) with the worst returns, the returns from sales don’t look that bad. And if you deduct current liabilities and cash from the reorganzation returns, but not the sale returns, the sale returns would equal the reorganization returns. JJ is just trying to make the best of another embarrassing situation in big case bankruptcy.
Joe Doherty is a coauthor with me on the reply. We hope to have something posted to SSRN shortly.
I really liked David Adam Friedman’s paper, Reinventing Consumer Protection (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=984082) which is coming out in the DePaul Law Review this fall. It presents inventive, outside-of-the-box thinking for protecting consumers from fraud.
Also, James Q. Whitman’s Consumerism Versus Producerism: A Study in Comparative Law, which is not on the web yet but is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, provides an excellent comparison of the very different ways that America and Europe protect consumers.
Neither is explicitly about consumer credit, but the lessons from each are easily transferred to credit cards, debt-relief agencies, and the like.
Lynn — You say tomayto, he says tomahto. I’m staying out. I’m also looking forward to reading the reply — this has been one of the best academic exchanges I’ve enjoyed this summer!
Although not strictly on the topic of consumer credit, Viviana Zelizer’s two books, “The Social Meaning of Money” (1994) and “The Purchase of Intimacy” (2005), are important reading for anyone working with consumer debtors. Both are interesting and well written.
Although not strictly on the topic of consumer credit, Viviana Zelizer’s two books, “The Social Meaning of Money” (1994) and “The Purchase of Intimacy” (2005), are important reading for anyone working with consumer debtors. Both are interesting and well written.