On May 2-3, the University of Illinois College of Law and the American Bankruptcy Institute are sponsoring "A Debtor’s World: An Interdisciplinary Academic on Debt." Our goals is to bring together leading scholars from different disciplines to have a conversation about how our society should use and think about debt. Confirmed speakers include Terry Halliday (American Bar Foundation), Heidi Hurd (Illinois, Philosophy and Law), Brian Knutson (Stanford, Neuroscience), Stephen Lea (Exeter, Psychology), Gerry McNamara (Michigan State, Management), Craig Muldrew (Queens College of Cambridge, History), George Ritzer (Maryland, Sociology), Amir Sufi (Chicago, Business), Teresa Sullivan (Michigan, Sociology), Paul Vaaler (Minnesota, Management), Elizabeth Warren (Harvard, Law), and Rich Wiener (Nebraska, Psychology). The keynote speaker is James Scurlock, the producer of the documentary Maxed Out. More information, including a link to the registration materials is here.
Category: Academic & Scholarly News
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Unmerchantable McDonalds’ Fries? New Commercial Law Blog
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Several law professors have started a new blog, Commercial Law, to offer their thoughts on issues arising under the Uniform Commercial Code or commercial laws. The blog is off to a lively start with daily postings on all sorts of topics, including the status of Revised Article 1 of the UCC, contracts of adhesion, and the future of teaching commercial law.
The post that caught my eye was Jennifer Martin’s post on a trio of cases alleging that McDonald’s products violate UCC sales provisions, including the warranty of merchantability. While all three cases failed (and I’m in agreement with Prof. Martin about the correctness of those rulings), it’s fun to think about how the UCC applies to so many ordinary transactions and to question how these doctrines hold up to shifting societal norms. For contracts or consumer law teachers, the cases provide fun hypothethicals for class, and for all of us who struggle to explain their legal specialty to friends and families, the cases offer an everyday, if somewhat silly, example of commercial disputes.
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Commercial Law at DePaul
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On May 1, DePaul University College of Law and the Commercial Law League of America are sponsoring a symposium entitled "Lawyers, Law Firms & the Legal Profession: An Ethical View of the Business of Law." The program appears aimed principally at practicing lawyers with topics such as whether the billable hour must die (echoing Scott Turow’s recent claim in the ABA Journal), lawyer mobility, and the state of ethics in the legal profession. The event will take place at the Westin Hotel on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. More information and how to register can be found here.
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Call for Banking and Consumer Financial Services Papers
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The University of Connecticut School of Law is hosting a Junior Scholar Workshop on Banking and Cosnumer Financial Services Law on May 28-29th. Consumer Financial Services is certainly a hot area of policymaking right now, and this academic conference promises to be exciting and timely.
Papers may be submitted by any law faculty with less than eight years of teaching, and may be on topics, including, but not limited to:
- State and federal supervision and regulation of bank safety and soundness
- Consumer financial services and the regulation of those services
- Payment systems and other topics of commercial law relating to consumer banking
- Legal implications of bank-based systems of finance; and
- International banking principles, supervision and regulation
Submissions are due Friday February 29th and may either be in the form of a full paper or a precis of 800-1200 words. To submit a paper or for more information, contact Prof. Patricia McCoy at the University of Connecticut School of Law.
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Update on Summer Reading
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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).
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Summer Reading “Contest”
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Remember the summer reading programs of your childhood, where you could keep track of your books, maybe prepare a few short reports on why you liked the books, and be entered in a drawing to win a grand prize–a new bike, a gift certificate at McDonalds, etc? Out of the same sense of nostalgia that brought back My Little Pony and Transformers, summer reading programs for adults are flourishing at libraries everywhere. Credit Slips is going to get into the action, in our own small way.
Leave a comment describing the most interesting or provocative book or article that you read this summer. The book/article must be bankruptcy or credit-related or plausibly related to the issues that we discuss on Credit Slips (no Harry Potter, please, unless you can explain how Harry Potter shed light on your understanding of debtor-creditor law). Please give the title, author, a short description, and if available, an online link.
What’s the prize? . . . . Hmmm . . . the joy of sharing your love of learning. Isn’t that really what motivated you back in elementary school; you didn’t actually want those Strawberry Shortcake stickers, did you? In two weeks, I’ll put together a summary of the most popular or interesting nominations, along with the name of the nominating reader.
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Living with the New Bankruptcy Law Conference
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The Debtor-Creditor section of the American Association of Law Schools is having a special meeting in conjunction with the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges’ Annual Meeting in Orlando. The NCBJ will meet October 10-12 and the Debtor-Creditor section will meet October 12-13. Registrants who sign up for the AALS Debtor-Creditor program, entitled Living with the New Bankruptcy Law, are admitted to the entire NCBJ program. The fee is very reasonable, thanks to efforts by the NCBJ to reach out to the academic community.
What’s on the program? It kicks off with a discussion led by six judges on collaborative curricular and extracurricular programs that can improve law students’ knowledge of bankruptcy law and practice. The next day, Eric Brunstad will give a keynote presentation of how federal courts do and should rule on bankruptcy issues. The plenary program that follows is entitled Perspectives on the Impact of the 2005 Act, at which I plan to present the first data from the new 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project Phase IV. Jonathan Lipson and William Widen are also making presentations at that panel, and Judge Wedoff will offer comments. The event winds up with concurrent sessions and an off-site dinner. All this is on top of the preceding days of NCBJ Annual Meeting presentations.
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Maxed Out in Class
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Many Credit Slips readers will be familiar with James Scurlock’s documentary, Maxed Out. If you’re not familiar with it, you should be. It’s a look at the consumer credit industry and is especially effective in conveying what happens to the individuals who are the victims of aggressive lending practices. You can get it on DVD. (We really need to get one of those Amazon.com click-through agreements so we can get our 5 cents when somebody clicks through to buy it.) If you’re a Netflix customer, you can watch it as part of their "Watch It Now" service (or do it the old-fashioned way and order the DVD).
As I’m putting together my syllabus for my Bankruptcy class this fall, I was considering whether to have a screening of the movie for the first day of class or otherwise requiring the students to see it. In the law school classroom, we’ll spend a lot of time on the rules, but it is easy to forget that these rules have real consequences for real people. The movie would provide powerful context to the stories we will see in our casebook. We’ll talk, for example, about the anti-modification provisions of chapter 13, a seemingly bland topic that really can be about whether someone keeps their house.
On the other hand, this particular movie has a strong point of view. Although it is a point of view with which I am in general agreement, not everyone shares it. On balance, I’m inclined not to require viewing the movie as part of the class but perhaps to have an optional screening for interested students. (And, if you happen to be one of my students, it won’t be on the final exam.) What do others think? Does this movie have place in the classroom, law school or otherwise?
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Fed Conference on Consumer Credit
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The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has just announced the six research papers that will be the focus of its upcoming Recent Developments in Consumer Credit and Payments conference. The papers are all written by economists and touch on a variety of bankruptcy or consumer credit topics that may interest Credit Slips readers. I’ve given the titles and brief descriptions of the papers below:
- The Age of Reason: Financial Decisions Over the Lifecycle (finding that middle-aged adults borrow at less cost compared to younger and older adults across ten financial market and that some of the measured effects cannot be explained by observed risk characteristics and may result from age effects)
- Who Makes Credit Card Mistakes? (reporting that lower wealth individuals make more credit card mistakes of all types)
- Bankruptcy: Is It Enough To Forgive or Must We Also Forget? (developing model suggesting that optimal law would forbid lenders from fully utilizing past information about bankruptcy)
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Moves & New Hires in the Legal Academy
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I did not get many e-mails in response to my request for information about moves in the legal academy in the areas of bankruptcy law, commercial law, or consumer law. You will excuse me, therefore, if this list is woefully incomplete. Also, I’ve done my best to make sure the information is accurate, but it can be difficult to find all of the information. Please e-mail me (rlawless-at-law-dot-uiuc-dot-edu) with corrections or updates, and I’ll add them to the list:
LATERAL MOVES
- Rich Hynes, from William & Mary College of Law to the University of Virginia
- Jason Kilborn, from Louisiana State by way of a visting professorship at the University of North Dakota to John Marshall Law School in Chicago (and a former Credit Slips guest blogger)
- Ronald Mann, from the University of Texas to Columbia Law School (and a former Credit Slips guest blogger)
- Bruce Price, from the University of Denver to the University of San Francisco
- Bob Rasmussen, from Vanderbilt University to become dean of the University of Southern California School of Law
- Nancy Rapoport, formerly the dean at the University of Houston Law Center and now a limited professor of law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas — that is the Gordon & Silver, Ltd., Professor of Law (my former professorship — I was once a limited professor also)
- Bernie Trujillo, from the University of Wisconsin to Valparaiso
NEW HIRES
- Kelli Alces, starting at Florida State after a visiting assistant professorship at Richmond
- Adam Levitin, starting at Georgetown
VISITS
- Ted Janger, at Brooklyn Law School and visiting at Harvard Law School in spring 2008 (and a former Credit Slips guest blogger)
- Lynn LoPucki, at UCLA and visiting at Washington University Law School in Fall 2007 and visiting at Harvard Law School in Spring 2008
- Chris Peterson, at Florida and visiting at the University of Utah for the 2007-2008 academic year
- Keith Rowley, at UNLV and visiting as the Charles E. Tweedy, Jr., Visiting Chairholder in Law at the University of Alabama for the 2007-2008 academic year
- Ed Morrison at Columbia University and visiting at the University of Chicago in the 2008 spring quarter
As I wrote above, let me know about any corrections or additions to this list. It would be especially great to hear about more new hires in these subject matters. Again, comments are closed, so please use e-mail.
UPDATED ON 7/2/07