Tulane’s annual “Corporate Law Institute” is coming up!  The conference - widely viewed as the must-attend deal conference of the year is April 3 and 4 (only two weeks away).

The roster for this year’s conference reads like a who’s who of the deal world, with a range of Delaware jurists, investment bankers, top lawyers, and Wall Street media on the two days worth of panels.

The conference, which is organized by practitioners (not Tulane folks), was started twenty years ago by former Delaware jurist and Tulane Law alum former Justice Andrew Moore.  (As you corporate law wonks know, Justice Moore wrote several of the big takeover opinions from Delaware in the mid-1980s.  Many in the corporate law world were scandalized when Justice Moore was not reappointed when his term expired, but, based on the takeover opinions he penned, those of us who are cynical about just how political and pro-defendant Delaware tries to be were not surprised.)  Justice Moore will be making an appearance on the 20^th year retrospective panel at the Tulane conference.

The conference should be stupendous, and I hope those of you who are reading this and will be attending the conference will make it your business to introduce yourselves to me.  I will be on the private equity panel on Friday, but I will be attending both days of the conference in full.

The specifics of the conference are here.

Tis the spring law review submission season (almost, depending on your view)!  This is the time of year where many members of law school faculties wrap up their law review draft articles and begin submitting them to various journals for consideration for publication.  Tomorrow Tulane is having a faculty roundtable on law review publishing, at which we will exchange our ideas on when to submit, how to submit (mail, e-mail, Expresso or otherwise, rounds or otherwise), etc.  In that vein, I am soliciting opinions, thoughts, and anecdotes here, regarding the submissions process.  (If you are a law school faculty member reading this, please consider forwarding this link to your law review editors to see if they have any comments they would be willing to share here regarding how, why, or when they select articles.)

Some topics for discussion here on the blog (or e-mail to me your thoughts if you would prefer not to share them here) (***Note scholars are posting their responses in the “comments” below.):

1.  When do you submit your winter/spring draft to law reviews for publication consideration?  February?  First week of March?  Last week of March?  Never in March?

2.  Do you submit in “rounds,” whereby you submit to certain publications first to gauge their interest, and then submit to different journals beyond that?  If so, how do you determine which journals should be part of your first “round” of submissions?

3.  Do you pull a piece if you do not get a law review placement that you want?  Or do you believe that, if you submit it, you had better be willing to take a placement that you get?

4.  Do you submit your drafts in the traditional manner using the mail, do you e-mail your articles to law reviews, do you use Expresso, or do you use some other service?

5.  Do you judge your colleagues or your peers based on the placement of their law review articles?

6.  Has your “best” article (in your own professional view) received the “best” placement of all your law review placements?  To that end, how do you explain how you scored your “best” placement?

7.  What is the most important tip you would give a junior colleague on your faculty on the law review submission and placement process?

is here, over at eCCP, and differs somewhat from Thom’s.

The takeway excerpt is:

Credit Suisse has important implications for antitrust practice. The decision’s effect is to narrow the scope of antitrust law and to invite efforts by regulated industries to narrow it still further. The court’s “clearly incompatible” standard is new and (though it purports not to) seems to water down considerably the old “plain repugnancy” test of Gordon v. New York Stock Exchange, Inc. 422 U.S. 659, 682 (1975). Under the new incompatibility standard, there no longer has to be an actual conflict between antitrust and other federal law for antitrust implicitly not to apply. Even a mere regulatory overlap may now be sufficient to trigger antitrust immunity. (Recall that in Credit Suisse the Court assumed that both antitrust and the SEC disapproved of the tying and other practices in question, and yet the Court still considered the two bodies of law incompatible on account of the regulatory overlap.) ….

Going forward, the Court will need to tighten the rule in Credit Suisse if it wants antitrust to continue to operate as Congress intended it to in conjunction with the compartmentalized maze of federal regulatory law. No one thinks that securities firms should be exempt from the legal obligations that generally flow from non-securities law (antitrust aside). If we expect to hold securities and other regulated firms accountable for torts and breaches of contract, or for crimes and discrimination, then why not also hold them accountable for antitrust violations? If Congress says otherwise, that is one thing. But if Congress is silent on the question, a federal agency should not have have any more power than a state to confer antitrust immunity upon those that it regulates. Of states we require a clearly articulated policy that presents an actual conflict, not merely the possibility of future potential incompatibility. From federal agencies we should not expect any less.

Just yesterday, in its historic decision in Leegin, the Court strongly reaffirmed its confidence in the Rule of Reason’s workability by overturning Dr. Miles and extending the rule’s reach to vertical RPM. That workability should make us equally confident that antitrust can peacefully coexist with the reguatory state.

I just updated our blog roll.  It now contains a link to the always-excellent Organizations & Markets Blog (Peter Klein and Nicolai Foss), mentioned/linked to by several of us before. 

Also, Marc Hodak (of frequent and excellent commenting fame) seems to have a blog, Hodak Value, to which we’ve added a link.  I look forward to reading more of that one.

And I finally got around to changing the name of the Antrust Prof Blog to Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog, which has improved on its already high quality with the addition of Danny Sokol.

A few weeks ago I suggested here that a merger between the two satellite radio firms, Sirius and XM, would not necessarily be as much of an antitrust problem as Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin seems to think.

Now market analyst Jim Cramer has weighed in on the issue and encouraged Karmazin to have Sirius do a hostile takeover of XM. While Cramer’s heart is in the right place, his suggestion that the merger would allow Sirius to “raise its prices, dictate its auto prices and get into retail with a vengeanceâ€? is not likely to help the deal succeed.

The extensive antitrust discussion that we had here a few weeks ago was all about why the deal would *not* enable Sirius/XM to raise its prices. As we pointed out then, these firms face extensive competition from other media, especially terrestrial radio, and therefore antitrust regulators need not be concerned about prices increasing in consequence of the merger. The benefits of the deal would rather be to reduce costs and improve product choices, particularly for consumers who would like one-stop access to proprietary content from both firms (e.g., someone who is a fan both of baseball, which XM carries, and football, which Sirius carries).

If Cramer is right that the deal would cause prices to increase, then there is more of an antitrust issue here than we thought.

We’re pleased to announce that Elizabeth Nowicki will be joining us for the next few weeks as a guest blogger. Elizabeth is an associate professor of law at the Universtiy of Richmond School of Law where she teaches corporations and m&a. She writes in the corporate and securities area and used to work for the SEC’s Office of the General Counsel.

The Conglomerate blog has issued a call for papers for its innovative blog-based workshop.  They’re looking for submissions by junior scholars on corporate law, securities, contracts, business tax, finance, antitrust or law and economics.  Click here for more details.

Bobby Bartlett will be guest blogging here for the next couple of weeks. Bobby is an Assistant Professor of Law at University of Georgia School of Law where he teaches Contracts and Payment Systems. He writes about private equity issues and recently completed a guest stint on the Glom.

Although I promptly alerted Google when we launched this blog about three months ago, our Google PageRank has always been 0 out of 10. Not anymore. We have suddenly emerged with a PageRank of 7 out of 10. PageRank is Google’s “measure of importance� of a page, and is determined as follows:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

For comparison purposes, here’s the current PageRanks of some other blawgs:

Bainbridge 7
Business Law Prof 6
Conglomerate 7
Co-Op 5
Ideoblog 6
Prawfs 6
VC 7

I’m surprised we stack up so well considering we don’t get anywhere near the number of hits that many of the above blawgs get. I assumed there would be a strong correlation. Anyway, thanks to those who link to us!

AALS SECTION ON SECURITIES REGULATION

CALL FOR PAPERS

FOR JANUARY 2007 ANNUAL MEETING

The AALS Section on Securities Regulation will hold its seventh meeting during the AALS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California from January 3-6, 2007. (The Section meeting is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, January 6, 2007).

The Executive Committee invites submissions of abstracts for paper presentations at this upcoming meeting. The Committee would prefer the theme(s) or topic(s) of the panel to be determined by the submissions we receive, rather than the other way around. So please feel free to send an abstract on anything you are working on that relates to securities regulation. The Section welcomes papers from a wide range of scholars and perspectives, including law and non-law scholars.

At least three papers will be presented, to be chosen from submissions made in response to this Call for Papers. If you are interested in presenting a paper, please submit an abstract of no more than five pages by May 10, 2006. Please direct your submission electronically (email) to:

Professor Stephen Choi
NYU Law School
e-mail: stephen.choi@nyu.edu

Papers will be selected after review by members of the Executive Committee of the Section on Securities Regulation.

Authors of accepted papers will be notified by the end of May, 2006.

The Empirical Legal Studies Blog—a collaborative effort of Jason Czarnezki (Marquette), Michael Heise (Cornell), William Ford (Chicago), and Theodore Eisenberg (Cornell)—launched today at www.elsblog.org. Its purpose is to “advance productive and interdisciplinary discourse among empirical legal scholars.” Welcome to the blogosphere ELS!

p.s: I noticed your site is lacking “TM”s. You may want to slap on a few.

The Council on Foreign Relations puts on some really impressive webcasts/conference calls. Here’s one TOTM readers may be especially interested in (if, that is, you’re one of those lucky people who doesn’t get hives listening to extended bouts of highly-politicized self rationalization):

The SEC in a Globalizing Securities Market:
A Conversation with the Past Four Chairmen

with

WILLIAM H. DONALDSON
Chairman & CEO, Donaldson Enterprises, Inc.;
Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission, 2003 to 2005
Speaker

HARVEY L. PITT
CEO, Kalorama Partners;
Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission, 2001 to 2003
Speaker

ARTHUR LEVITT
Senior Advisor, The Carlyle Group;
Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission, 1993 to 2001
Speaker

RICHARD C. BREEDEN
Chairman, Richard C. Breeden & Co.;
Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission, 1989 to 1993
Speaker

BENN STEIL
Senior Fellow and Director of International Economics,
Council on Foreign Relations
Presider

Wednesday, February 22, 2006
8:30 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. (Eastern Time)

See below the fold for viewing instructions

(more…)

It seems that I have broken my hand. Blogging will suffer (or improve, depending on your point of view). I know my co-bloggers will continue to provide the sort of top-notch commentary you’ve come to expect from TOTM, and I will strive to peck out a couple of posts over the next few weeks.

That dapper fellow who is our “favicon” is Adam Smith. In case you couldn’t tell.