Credit Slips welcomes Professor Ronald Mann as our inaugural guest blogger. He is the Ben H. & Kitty King Powell Chair in Business and Commercial Law and the Co-Director of the Center for Law, Business, and Economics at the University of Texas School of Law and an expert on credit card law and policy. While one of his more impressive achievements is arguably the distillation of his myriad accomplishments into a concise CV, I’ll be an obedient blogger and focus instead on the reason that I think his work is really important.  In a decade of scholarly research, Ronald has masterfully blended public and private law concerns to show how something as arcane and ominous sounding as a "payment system" shapes how consumers spend and borrow, and how these choices affect society. He marshals credible empirical data for his analyses and presents his findings in a balanced and measured way. Translation: he has thought long and hard about what’s good and what’s bad about credit cards and other payment devices, and he will make you think long and hard about the same. If you find his postings intriguing, read his just-released book Charging Ahead: The Growth and Regulation of Payment Card Markets Around the World. It’s accessible but sophisticated, and I commend it to Credit Slips readers.

Credit Slips will begin to feature guest bloggers who will join us for a week at a time. Beginning on Monday, September 18, we will be honored to have as a guest Ronald Mann, the Ben H. & Kitty King Powell Chair in Business and Commercial Law at the University of Texas. In October, we will be privileged to have contributions from Viviana Zelizer, the Lloyd Cotsen ’50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.

We will not have guest bloggers every week, but we wanted to begin adding new voices and ideas to Credit Slips. The usual rules apply. Everyone is responsible for his or her own posts. Appearance on this blog as a regular or guest blogger does not imply that person agrees with or takes responsibility for any posts other than his or her own. Each blogger decides individually whether to allow comments to a post.

We hope the guest bloggers will make this site even more valuable to our readers.

This is going to seem like an unusual request, but I have been in tech support hell for the past few days. Everyone has tried to be helpful, but I cannot figure out whether we are having a problem with the blog or not. One person reported to me an inability to reach the site, but we could not figure out whether the problem was with her ISP or with our site. I now know far more about Internet domains than I ever wanted to know. Yesterday, I had a problem accessing the site for about thirty seconds. It was as if the domain did not exist but only for that short time period. It’s one of those computer problems that is intermittent, making it extremely difficult to diagnose.

First, if you’ve have had problems accessing the site, I apologize. If you have had problems, could you post a comment and let me know. What makes this even stranger is that it seems to be characterized by a geographic locale than an ISP. If you could let me know your geographic location, that would be great. The comments are moderated meaning I will see them but they won’t get posted to the blog. Thanks.

Welcome to Credit Slips, a new blog on all things about credit and
bankruptcy. In this space, the seven of us will be doing what we like to do when
we get together–discussing and debating what does happen and what should happen when consumers
and businesses borrow money. Because most every consumer or business
borrows money, we hope to have a lot to say that will interest a lot of people.

We are seven academics who have come to know each other over the years and are
now in the middle of a large research project known as Consumer Bankruptcy Project IV. The
authors of the blog will be:

• Melissa Jacoby, law professor, University of North Carolina
• Bob Lawless, law professor, University of Illinois
• Angie Litwin, Climenko Fellow, Harvard Law School
• Katie Porter, law professor, University of Iowa
• John Pottow, law professor, University of Michigan
• Debb Thorne, sociology professor, Ohio University
• Elizabeth Warren, law professor, Harvard Law School

More information about each of us appears in the links on the left-hand side.

We intend to make the site of general interest to anyone who is concerned
about debt and credit issues, and we’ll come at these issues from different
perspectives. Among the seven of us, we have areas of special interest on debt
such as how it especially affects families, entrepreneurs, the elderly, and
persons in rural area. Basically, we’ll be posting on whatever we encounter in
our research and teaching that is new, different, or important. We’ll try to
keep the discussion lively and the topics interesting.

1. We do not provide legal advice, and nothing on this site should be construed as legal advice. We are not all even lawyers. Those of us who are lawyers can get in trouble for giving advice outside the states where we are licensed. Being in debt can be very stressful, and we understand the desire to reach out for help. Please do not contact us for advice because we cannot help you.

2. There are four "regular" and ten "occasional" bloggers. Everyone is only responsible for what they post. We often disagree among ourselves. When we are together, we often cannot even agree on where to go for dinner. Just because one of us posted something on this web site does not mean the others agree. All of that is also true for our guest bloggers–they are no more responsible for our views than we are for their views (although we will let our guest bloggers pick where to go for dinner).

3. We will not substantively edit our posts except for grammatical, stylistic, or spelling errrors (and sometimes not even then). If we later add something to a post, we will make it clear by prefacing the addition with the word "Update" or something similar.

4. Comments are open. Individual blog authors may decide not to allow comments for all or some of their posts. Readers are welcome to post their comments, and we welcome open debate. We will remove comments that we find inappropriate such as comments that are profane or vulgar, commercial marketing, ad hominem attacks, or nothing but inflammatory rhetoric. We get very few such comments.

5. We encourage readers to share our blog with others and to use Credit Slips postings in news pieces or academic writing. If possible, we would appreciate your linking to the blog when you reproduce our content and acknowledging the name of the individual author of the posting.

6. We do not accept unsolicited content.