On behalf of the Credit Slips bloggers, I want to thank Jim Hawkins from the University of Houston Law Center for joining us the past couple of weeks. Jim has been a new voice on consumer debt issues and has been pushing against the legal academy's conventional wisdom on these issues for being too . . . . well, conventional. Jim's commentary on financial distress, for example, is a good example. We talk a lot about "financial distress" but rarely give the term the precise meaning it deserves. Jim's posts the past few weeks have given Credit Slips readers a sense of his work, and we have enjoyed having him offer his new perspective to the topics we discuss every day.