Sociological Perspectives

Bankruptcy and Mindfulness

12/17/19

The practice of mindfulness and other types of meditation are growing on the coasts and within the law school and lawyer communities. Perhaps these practices can provide meaningful benefits to bankruptcy clients, bankruptcy lawyers and bankruptcy professors and judges. The essence of "mindfulness for lawyers" efforts begins with the notion that the adversary system can take a toll on home life, friendships and our own notions of who we want to be.

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What a Local Traffic Snafu Teaches About Artificial Intelligence in Underwriting

11/13/19

The DC suburbs are a case study in NIMBYism. Lots of communities try to limit through-traffic via all sorts of means:  speed bumps, one-way streets, speed cameras, red-light cameras, etc.  The interaction of one of these NIMBYist devices with GPS systems is a great lesson about the perils of artificial intelligence and machine learning in all sorts of contexts.  Bear with the local details because I think there's a really valuable lesson here.

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Matt Levine, Insider Trading and Mr. Potato Chip

09/26/19

Matt Levine is my favorite financial journalist to read on a regular basis because he is so darn funny (yes, there is lots of substance too, but I'm shallow and want to be entertained as well). Today's piece though, especially to someone who used to teach the law on insider trading, was priceless.

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Anderson and Nyarko's Cool New Papers on Contract Evolution

09/05/19

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 Incomplete Contracts” (here).

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Coyle on Studying the History of a Contract Provision

08/03/19

The way many of us teach interpretation in Contract Law, there is little role for history (admittedly, this is just based on casual observation).

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Ramming Bow Contracts

07/17/19

Have you heard of Ramming Bows? Or did you know that they describe a category of boilerplate contract provisions?  Until a couple of weeks ago, I had not either.  That was when I came across Glenn West’s two delightful blog posts at the Weil Gotshal & Manges site (here and here).

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Home Contract Financing and Black Wealth

05/31/19

A remarkable new quantitative study finds that over two decades, African American home buyers in Chicago lost between $3 and $4 billion in wealth because of credit apartheid. The study authors from research centers at Duke, UIC and Loyola-Chicago reviewed property records for more than 3,000 Chicago homes.

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New (from the archives) paper on determinants of personal bankruptcy

02/13/19

This working paper is a longitudinal empirical study of lower-income homeowners, including a subset of bankruptcy filers, produced with an interdisciplinary team of cross-campus colleagues, including Professor Roberto Quercia, director of UNC's

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