Academic & Scholarly News

In putting together a revised syllabus for my consumer finance course this semester, I was struck with how different this nascent field is from established courses like Contracts.  No matter what Contracts casebook one uses to teach, there are a bunch of well-established chestnuts that everyone knows:  Hadley v. Baxendale, for example, or Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture, Raffles v. Wichelhaus, Frigaliment, Lucy Lady Duff Gordon, Hawkins v. McGee, or Jacobs & Young v. Kent (and one could go on and on).

At the end of a lively session yesterday at Duke Law School featuring Professor Stephen Ware of University of Kansas Law School, there was a brief discussion of whether shorter foreclosure timelines and clearer rules would promote more workouts of delinquent mortgages.

The Section on Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services will have a record four events at this weekend's Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. The theme is rethinking and reviving the field of financial institutions on the ground and in the academy. We will take stock of reforms so far and consider the impact of the crises in the United States and Europe, but also will take a long-term view of the field from diverse theoretical, policy, and methodological perspectives.

Funny to see the juxtaposition in the New York Times of a piece berating law schools for the irrelevance of their curriculum and then a piece about our former co-blogger Elizabeth Warren, a law professor whose work can be called anything but irrelevant (unless you think conceiving and standing up a new gove