A new Cato Book Forum Wednesday May 14th at Noon:

Featuring the author, Steven Teles, University of Maryland and Yale University Law School, with comments from Roger Pilon, Cato Institute and Hon. David McIntosh, Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, former Member of Congress (R-IN), Federalist Society Co-Founder.

Starting in the 1970s, conservatives learned that electoral victory did not easily convert into a reversal of important liberal accomplishments, especially in the law. As a result, conservatives’ mobilizing efforts increasingly turned to law schools, professional networks, public interest groups, and the judiciary—areas traditionally controlled by liberals. Drawing from previously unavailable internal documents, as well as interviews with key figures, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement examines this sometimes fitful, and still only partially successful, conservative (and libertarian) challenge to liberal domination of the law. Steven Teles explores how this mobilization was shaped by the legal profession and the difficulties in matching strategic opportunities with effective organizational responses. He explains how foundations and other groups promoting conservative ideas built a network designed to dislodge legal liberalism from American elite institutions. And he portrays the reality, not of a grand strategy masterfully pursued, but of individuals and political entrepreneurs learning from trial and error. The book provides an unprecedented look at the inner life of one of the most striking developments in American public affairs over the last several decades.

Northwestern University School of Law’s Searle Center on Law, Regulation and Economic Growth will be holding a conference on Antitrust Economics and Competition Policy on September 26-27th.  From the Call for Papers:

The goal of this Research Symposium is to provide a forum where leading scholars from across the country can gather together with Northwestern’s own distinguished faculty to present and discuss high quality research relevant to antitrust economics and competition policy. Both theoretical and empirical submissions are welcome. Papers in industrial organization or applied microeconomic theory that address issues relevant to antitrust policy are welcome even if they do not directly focus on particular antitrust policy issues or institutions. We hope to involve leading thinkers from the government, non-profit, and private sector, as well as leading academics from economics departments, business schools, law schools and public policy schools. While most of the conference will be devoted to presentation and discussion of original academic research, we also expect to schedule a small number of panels on important current topics or policy issues. If you have questions about the appropriateness of your paper for the symposium, or suggestions for panel subjects, please contact Professor William Rogerson, Research Director, Searle Center Research Project on Competition, Antitrust and Regulation (wrogerson@northwestern.edu)

NOTE: The deadline for abstracts is April 15, 2008!

First, David Bernstein reports on GMU’s very productive hiring season which includes the additions of Helen Alvare, Laura Bradford, T.J. Chiang, Jonathan Mitchell, Adam Mossoff, Chris Newman, David Schleicher, and Jay Verret.  

Second, Brian Leiter reports that Jonathan Klick (Florida State), a graduate of GMU Law (and of the economics department with a Phd in 2003) and former Levy Fellow, has accepted a tenured offer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.  Congratulations to both Jon and Penn!

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.

Todd Zywicki and Maxwell Stearns have a draft of their new textbook, “Public Choice Concepts and Applications in the Law,” available for review for profs that are interested in teaching with the manuscript this Fall 2008 or Spring 2009 term (the book is due to be published in 2009).  The book is designed for law profs along with “teachers of economics, political science, and public policy courses as well … and to be taught as either a follow-on to a traditional law and economics course or as a substitute for a traditional law and economics course.”  Zywicki & Stearns description of the project and invitation for those interested in early adoption to view the current manuscript is below the fold.

(more…)

Thats the opening line of my colleague and Green Bag Editor Ross Davies’ announcement (posted here) that The Green Bag is ready to enter the law school rankings game.  The Deadwood Report (see also Inside Higher Ed) has law school puffery and false advertising in its sights.  The basic idea is that the available information on the relative quality of law schools and faculties is poor and generally not improving (with at least one notable exception).  The methodology is as follows: 

First, download the law school’s web pages containing all pertinent information about the law school’s “faculty,” course schedules and catologs, and individual faculty member pages with vitas and publications.

Second, compile and analyze the data by assigning weights to various types of scholarship or teaching.  For example, Davies notes that publications in the home school’s journal and op-eds will not be weighted.  Also, the weights will favor “well-rounded” faculty members that are active as both scholars and teachers.  This seems to be a bit of a tax on specialization, but that doesn’t bother too much.  The rankings should be easy to reconfigure with alternative weights.  I, for one, would be interested in something like a crude concentration index for publications, e.g. what percentage of scholarship is produced by the top 4, top 8? 

Third, send the preliminary results to the school’s dean, ask for corrections, and provide an opportunity to fix any errors in the school’s website before re-visiting the websites and incorporating modifications.

Leiter is quoted in the Inside Higher Ed piece as warning that “the editors are setting themselves up for a world of grief from the faculties deemed to have lots of ‘deadwood’ and the individual faculty so classified.”  No doubt the grief is coming.  There will obviously be some expected grumbling about The Deadwood Report, its methodology, how different forms of scholarship and teaching are weighted, and even the name!  But like Leiter’s rankings, The Deadwood Report should be a valuable service to consumers of legal education (and law professors).  The Deadwood Report promises to source all data so that those who are not pleased with the way that they weight certain activities or classify faculty members can offer an alternative set of rankings.

Law schools may not like to be held accountable for what is on their websites and in their law porn, but it strikes me as a bit disingenuine to complain too loudly when they are.  If a law school would like to specialize by having some faculty who do research and others who bear the brunt of the teaching load, or have a team of all-stars who can do it all, either of these strategies is fine.  But it strikes me as perfectly reasonable for the law school to communicate truthfully about what it is doing or else be held accountable for its public statements to consumers.  Time to update those websites …

CELS 2008 will be held at Cornell Law School this year September 12 and 13.  Submissions are due by April 15th.  CELS has quickly become one of the best conferences of the year and I’m very much looking forward to attending.  Here’s the conference announcement:

The conference’s objectives are: (1) to encourage and develop empirical and experimental scholarship on legal issues by providing scholars with an opportunity to present and discuss their work with an interdisciplinary group of people interested in the empirical study of law; and (2) to stimulate ongoing conversations among scholars in law, economics, political science, demographics, finance, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines. The conference’s audience will include paper presenters, commentators, and other attendees, and will include many of the nation’s leading empirical legal scholars. The goal is productive discourse on both particular papers and appropriate methodologies. We especially encourage submissions from junior scholars.

See you there.

My colleague Lloyd Cohen and I are editing a volume for Edward Elgar on Pioneers in Law and Economics.  We’ve collected a dozen or so top notch essays from leading law and economics scholars covering the pioneers in the discipline and their contributions.  I’ll have more details to post about this project in a month or so — including a full list of contributing authors, subjects, and of course, details on how to buy the book!!!  If you’re interested in a preview, Larry Ribstein’s entry, Henry Manne: Intellectual Entreprenuer, and Kate Litvak’s, Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel, are both available on SSRN right now.  As Larry notes in his post, the two essays combined are an excellent guide to the last 40 years of corporate law and economics.

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?

The FTC recently released its agenda for its upcoming public workshop on February 12 on “Unilateral Effects Analysis in Litigation.”  The announcement motivates the conference as follows:

Among economists, unilateral effects is a widely accepted theory of competitive harm. Yet, the federal antitrust agencies have experienced limited success litigating differentiated product cases in district courts under unilateral effects theory. Calling together leading lawyers and economists to discuss these issues is a central component of Chairman Majoras’ efforts to refine the Commission’s ability to explain and prove cases based on unilateral effects theory.

The agenda is available here. 

The ABA has announced a Fellowship Award for $5,000 and travel expenses for unpaid summer employment “within approved government agencies (federal, state, or international) dedicated to the enforcement of antitrust laws, or other institutions whose primary mission is to advance the study of antitrust and competition law.”  The application packet is availabe here, and lists certain institutions that pre-qualify.

This sounds like a great opportunity for a 1L or 2L who is interested in antitrust and competition policy.  The application deadline is March 28th.

GW Lawprof Michael Abramowicz is guest blogging over at the Volokh Conspiracy on the virtues of prediction markets and his new book: Predictocracy.

Thom was recently invited to draft a critical response to a symposium at the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies on the future of single firm conduct.  The transcript from the Roundtable Discussion is available on SSRN.  Thom graciously asked me to join him in drafting a short critical piece to the symposium. It is difficult to respond to an entire symposium in under 20 pages, and we are quite sure we were not able to get to it all of it. We did our best to hit the highlights and central themes of the conversation and contrast the generally pro-interventionist views expressed by the conference panelists with our more skeptical views about the proper scope of the antitrust enterprise in our modern economy. With that said, Antitrust (Over-?)Confidence is now available on SSRN. It will be published in the Loyola Consumer Law Review. Here is the abstract:

On October 5, 2007, a group of antitrust scholars convened on Chicago’s Near North Side to discuss monopolization law. In the course of their freewheeling but fascinating conversation, a number of broad themes emerged. Those themes can best be understood in contrast to a body of antitrust scholarship that was born six miles to the south, at the University of Chicago. Most notably, the North Side discussants demonstrate a hearty confidence in the antitrust enterprise-a confidence that is not shared by Chicago School scholars, who generally advocate a more modest antitrust. As scholars who are more sympathetic to Chicago School views, we are somewhat skeptical. While we applaud many the of the insights and inquiries raised during the conversation, and certainly this sort of discussion in general, our task in this article is to draft a critical analysis of the October 5 conversation. In particular, we critique the North Side discussants’ vision of a big antitrust that would place equal emphasis on Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act and would expand private enforcement of Section 2.

Download it.

I am very pleased to announce the “Merger Analysis in High Technology Markets” on behalf of my colleague Tom Hazlett, myself, and the Information Economy Project of the National Center for Technology and Law. The conference will be held at George Mason University School of Law on February 1, 2008 from 8:15 am-2:30 pm. Below is the conference agenda and information about attending. We hope to see you there!

INFORMATION ECONOMY PROJECT
THOMAS W. HAZLETT, DIRECTOR
DREW CLARK, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR
JOSHUA D. WRIGHT, CONFERENCE ORGANIZER

MERGER ANALYSIS IN HIGH TECHNOLOGY MARKETS

HAZEL HALL * GMU SCHOOL OF LAW * ROOM 121

8:15 WELCOME * THOMAS HAZLETT (GMU)

8:20 MORNING KEYNOTE

8:45 PANEL 1 * MODERATOR: KEN HEYER (DOJ)

HOWARD SHELANSKI (UC BERKELEY)
TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION AND MERGER POLICY’S THIRD ERA

MICHAEL BAYE (FTC)
MARKET DEFINITION IN ONLINE MARKETS

RICHARD GILBERT (UC BERKELEY)
SKY WARS: THE ATTEMPTED MERGER OF DISH/ DIRECTV

10:00 BREAK

10:15 PANEL 2 * MODERATOR: MICHAEL VITA (FTC)

HAL SINGER (CRITERION) & ROBERT HAHN (AEI)
AN ANTITRUST ANALYSIS OF GOOGLE’S PROPOSED ACQUISITION OF DOUBLECLICK

MARY COLEMAN (LECG)
NICE THEORY BUT WHERE’S THE EVIDENCE?: THE USE OF ECONOMIC EVIDENCE TO EVALUATE VERTICAL AND CONGLOMERATE MERGERS IN THE US AND EU

LUKE FROEB (VANDERBILT)
MERGERS AMONG FIRMS THAT LICENSE COMMON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

11:30 BREAK

11:45 PANEL 3*MODERATOR: JONATHAN BAKER (AMERICAN)

BRUCE ABRAMSON (CRAI)
ARE “ONLINE MARKETS” REAL AND RELEVANT?

THOMAS HAZLETT (GMU)
ANTITRUST IN ORBIT: SOME DYNAMICS OF HORIZONTAL MERGER ANALYSIS IN THE CASE OF XM-SIRIUS

J. GREG SIDAK (GEORGETOWN)
EVALUATING MARKET POWER WITH TWO-SIDED DEMAND AND PREEMPTIVE OFFERS TO DISSIPATE MONOPOLY RENT: LESSONS FOR HIGH-TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRIES FROM THE PROPOSED MERGER OF XM AND SIRIUS SATELLITE RADIO MERGER

1:00 LUNCH

LUNCH KEYNOTE

2:30 ADJOURN

VENUE: The George Mason University School of Law, Hazel Hall, 3301 Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA 22201 (near the Virginia Square-GMU Metro — Orange Line). Admission is free, but seating is limited. To reserve your spot, please email Drew Clark: iep.gmu@gmail.com. Parking (at market rates) is available in the GMU Foundation Bldg., 3434 Washington Boulevard. An Arlington campus map is found here: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/infoservices/ArlingtonMap07.pdf.