News Topic: Sociological Perspectives

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How exactly do people make ends meet? While there are a few formal studies of "payment hierachies" courtesy of the big data organizations, there is little ethnographic work. A new contribution in this regard is "Robbing Peter to Pay ... Read full article

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Paul Krugman has a column today about the blind, fundamentalist faith in efficient markets.  This is a phenomenon that Stephen Lubben and I have been discussing recently (did Krugman just preempt our paper idea?), as we've both encountered it in the ... Read full article

At a conference on consumer bankruptcy policy over the weekend in At ... Read full article

If you are looking for trite and oversimplified assertions about bankruptcy stigma, then stay away from the latest issue of the  American Bankruptcy Law Journal . In those pages, Professor Michael Sousa  from the University of Denver has a wonderful paper ... Read full article

It's all the rage these days to beat up on law school as a bad investment and to moan about the economic travails of the legal profession.  There are some reasonable critiques that can be leveled at the shape of legal education and its costs and ... Read full article

A city in bank ... Read full article

Snaking up a mountain road toward our favorite trailhead yesterday, Stewart and I realized we’d face some moral dilemmas when we arrived. Assuming we could get into the National Forest at all, would we pay the fee, even though no one would fine us if we ... Read full article

Prof. Jonathan Lipson of Temple University School of Law has an interesting post today on the idea of “Relational Reorganization.”   Find it over at the ContractsProf blog . ... Read full article

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My colleague, Jennifer Robbennolt, and I have posted a paper to SSRN exploring apologies in the bankruptcy context. Jennifer has done some of the leading studies on apologies in different legal contexts. Contrary to the instincts of many lawyers, ... Read full article

The Yellow Pages that arrived at my door yesterday. This strange book is an object of great fascination to a generation that has grown up watching YouTube and relying on Wikipedia instead of World Book and Brittanica.  It was pure Kismet, but when I ... Read full article

Kiva.org is the on-line microlending network that allows anyone to lend $25 or more to individual low-income borrowers around the world for micro-enterprise and housing.   Kiva is an entirely different way of thinking about credit and financial ... Read full article

While we wait to see if the second Obama administration will do anything new to help homeowners hit by the lingering mortgage crisis (finally replace Bush-holdover Ed DeMarco at FHFA to make way for debt relief ?), there’s time to review a recent ... Read full article