News Topic: Economic Perspectives

What could possibly trigger me enough to break a two-year blogging hiatus? A sudden burning desire to consider the difference among budget accountability, debt accountability, and the inane, moronic, irrational, exploding human appendix ****show that is ... Read full article

A long-in-process draft article has just become available to be downloaded and read here . Comments remain welcome.  The Weinstein Company bankruptcy features prominently in this draft article.  ... Read full article

I've long assumed that law school rankings are very important to law student choices regarding where to attend school. After all, why else would law schools themselves care so much about the rankings -- sometimes even hiring and firing deans based on ... Read full article

Last year, when I was in zoom teaching hell and desperately looking for videos or podcasts with my contracts heroes to try and give my students a window into the magic of contract law and theory, I was unable to find anything at all that I could use for ... Read full article

There is a rich literature on the question of the gender gap in the legal profession, with wonderful work by scholars such as Elizabeth Gorman, Ronit Dinotvitzer, Fiona Kay, Joyce Sperling and others. One of the gaps in this literature that I've ... Read full article

I've been doing some reading on officer and director fiduciary duties to creditors, and I am surprised that how much the academic and practitioner consensus seems to have settled on the notion that, in light of the Delaware caselaw following ... Read full article

Cathy Hwang and Matt Jennejohn, two of the brightest young stars of the contract world, just put up a paper summarizing their view of one of the exciting new directions that contract research is taking. They describe it as the study of contractual ... Read full article

Perhaps the most discussed and hotly debated corporate finance/contracts case of the last year was Windsteam LLC v. Aurelius (SDNY 2019) (for Stephen's wonderful post on this, see here ). ... Read full article

Roughly eighty years ago, Lon Fuller and William Perdue (the former, then a faculty member at Duke Law, and the latter, a 3L), wrote two of the most famous articles in contract law ( here ). One of the puzzles they posed -- about why the law favors the ... Read full article

I shudder even as I write these words, but I’m increasingly fascinated by insurance contracts.  If you are interested in the processes by which standard form contracts evolve – which I am -- then you can’t help but be sucked into this world. Coming from ... Read full article

Iraq’s debt restructuring a decade and a half ago was one of the few things that went right with the US incursion into that country in 2003.  Thanks to a combination of an expensive war with Iran, mismanagement and corruption on the part of Saddam and his ... Read full article

I’ve long been fascinated by debt buybacks by issuers, in large part because they seemed to occupy a loophole in the securities disclosure laws.  A company could do a buyback of bonds and, because bondholders are not owed fiduciary duties by the company, ... Read full article

This post draws considerably from research on Puerto Rico and its current constitutional status with Joseph Blocher (see here ). ... Read full article

by Mark Weidemaier & Mitu Gulati ... Read full article

I confess that, on its face, this did not strike me as the most exciting topic to read about (and that comes from someone who writes about the incredibly obscure world of sovereign debt contracts).  After all, who even knows what EBITDA definitions are?  ... Read full article

( This post draws directly from ideas from co authored work with Joseph Blocher ; and particularly the numerous discussions we have had about the incentives that a market for sovereign control might create for nations to take better care of their minority ... Read full article

Two of the contracts papers I’ve been most looking forward to this fall have just been posted on ssrn. They are are Rob Anderson’s “An Evolutionary Perspective on Contracting: Evidence From Poison Pills” ( here ) and Julian Nyarko’s “Stickiness and ... Read full article

Scholars of constitutional law and judicial behavior have long conjectured that judges behave differently during times of crisis. ... Read full article