Of potential interest to TOTM readers (especially those who can read Chinese), Stephen Cheung has a blog. (HT: Peter Klein)

That is where TOTM lands on Race to the Bottom’s list of the Top 50 Most Influential Law Faculty Blogs for 2007 based upon traffic, links, and citations.

UPDATE: Or #68 amongst economics blogs…

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?

In yesterday’s Super Tuesday primaries, Hillary Clinton won the two largest contests–California and New York–but the delegate count was close to even (perhaps Clinton even finished slightly behind) because Barack Obama won more states, albeit smaller ones.

The Clinton campaign argues that Clinton’s victories in larger, delegate-rich states suggest that she would be a more viable candidate than Obama in the general election. But does that conclusion really follow?

I don’t see why. States that are heavily Democratic, whether large or small, are very likely to vote for whoever is running on the Democratic ticket in November. The candidate who gives Democrats the best hopes of winning in the general election is the one who will do better among moderates, independents, and Republicans. So the fact that Clinton won in heavily Democratic states such as New York and California does not seem to be a very meaningful statistic for assessing whether she or Obama would do better in the general election. To the contrary, the candidates’ relative performance in more politically balanced or conservative states (regardless of size) would seem like a better indicator of general electability, especially in such states where independents and Republicans are permitted to participate in the Democratic primary. Judging by that measure, Obama is the candidate who seems more likely to do better in the general election.

To be sure, the campaign is far from over and much can still happen to influence voter opinion in the remaining primary contests and in the general election. My goal here is simply to debunk some spin by the Clinton campaign that seems to be based on an erroneous statistical inference.

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

Motivated by a slate of forthcoming articles, books, and various projects involving unincorporated firms, Professor Ribstein has announced his plans to begin blogging more extensively about partnership, LLCs and agency issues over at Ideoblog. This is good news to anybody interested in issues of business law and finance more generally. Two early installments in this endeavor are already up here and here. With all of Professor Ribstein’s upcoming projects, I was a bit concerned that the cost of these increased efforts might be less time dedicated to exposing the hand waving economic illiteracy of Ben Stein in the NY Times. I guess I don’t have to worry about that.

That’s the name of a new economics blog from an economist/blogger claiming to “have an Economics PhD from a very reputable program.”  I’m not sure I really like the idea of anonymous blogging of this sort, and am sure I don’t like the idea of anonymous bloggers announcing their credentials, but I do like the content of the blog so far.

If traffic and number of comments are any indication, this one from Geoff on the antitrust analysis of the Whole Foods/ Wild Oats merger certainly attracted the most attention.

Its been a fun year of of blogging.  Thanks to all of the TOTM bloggers, guests, commenters, and readers for making it so interesting!  Happy New Year!  See you in 2008.

Recently, Frank Pasquale at Concurring Opinions wrote a blog post did a drive-by hit on FTC Chairman Majoras supporting her recusal from considering the Google/DoubleClick merger now pending before the FTC.  You really have to read the post to get the full effect of the innuendo and intimation–it’s masterfully subtle.  At the time I commented on his blog:

Ah, muckraking. A time-worn tradition. So, let me see if I get this straight. Majoras is incapable of acting scrupulously in assessing gouging claims because she has, in the past, advised oil companies (among hundreds of other companies). Nevermind the airtight arguments against price gouging by oil companies and the broad and vast company saying the same things as Majoras. And this tenuous, utterly-unsupported (and oh-so-carefully implicit) claim of bias thus supports calls for Majoras to recuse herself from involvement in a wholly-unrelated case, in a different industry entirely, because, something like, “she’s done it before; she’ll do it again!” I see. Yes, very compelling.

Now comes news, not reported by Frank, that the claims in the recusal motion are pretty far from the mark.  Majoras’ statement (and Kovacic’s statement in response to a similar motion) and the statement of the remaining members of the FTC supporting her are here.  The salient parts:

To fully explain why recusal is not required here, I first must correct some key factual errors contained in the Petition. The Petition states that “Petitioners learned on Monday, December 10, 2007 that Doubleclick, has retained the Washington law firm of Jones Day to represent the company before the Federal Trade Commission in the pending merger review.” (Petition, page 1 ¶ 3). . . . Jones Day does not represent DoubleClick before the FTC and, indeed, in dozens of meetings and submissions, has never appeared or even been mentioned.

More importantly, the Petition also incorrectly states that “The Spouse of the FTC Chairman, John M. Majoras, is currently an equity partner with the law firm Jones Day.” (Petition, page 2 ¶ 5). As of January 1, 2006, John Majoras converted from an equity to a non-equity status and became a fixed participation partner in Jones Day. I understand that as a fixed participation partner, his compensation will not be increased or affected by changes in the firm’s income. Further, all benefits my husband receives from Jones Day are the same as those earned by other similarly situated non-equity partners in the firm. Therefore, my husband does not have a financial interest in the firm’s income, and thus I do not have an imputed financial interest.

In 2004 and 2005, when my husband was still an equity partner, I assumed that I would have a financial interest in FTC matters in which Jones Day represented a party and recused myself in such matters, as petitioners note. (Petition, page 3 ¶ 8-12). After my husband relinquished his equity interest in the firm’s income, I began to consider participating in FTC matters in which Jones Day represented a party, in consultation with the FTC’s Ethics Official. FTC staff and I continue to actively monitor FTC filings and public appearances, as well as any public statements that we may see, to determine whether Jones Day is involved in FTC matters.

The final point helps to explain the petitioner’s oh-so-sinister assertion, duly quoted by Frank, that Majoras had recused herself from cases involving Jones Day before, but not this time . . . .

At any rate, I just thought I might keep the record straight for the blawgosphere.

TOTM is never above a little bit of self promotion.  In that spirit, I’m very pleased to announce that we’ve made #64 on Brian Gongol’s rankings of business and economics blogs.  Aaron Schiff, author of an excellent new (at least to me) economics blog called 26econ.com, also has a new set of rankings for economics blogs which is available here.  TOTM comes in at #52 on Schiff’s rankings.  On top of that, TOTM also made Bootstrappers list of the “100 .edu Sites That Every Entrepreneur Should Read.”  I didn’t really know we were a .edu site, but I don’t let those sort of details bother me.  It’s just nice to know somebody is reading.  Thank you to our readers on behalf of everybody here at TOTM.

Finally, Schiff also has up some posts (and data) that might interest TOTM readers on voluntary pricing (a la Radiohead) in the music industry.  Go check it out.

Over at Agoraphilia, Glen Whitman has a series of entertaining posts applying economic logic to a number of interesting topics. If you read Glen on a regular basis, than you won’t be surprised that the topics include things like restroom hand dryers and toilet seat signaling. But the post that caught my attention this week attends to more mainstream subject matter. Glen responds to the thesis of Joel Waldfogel’s new book, The Tyranny of Markets, that the market fails to satisfy the preferences of small, idiosyncratic groups with minority preferences. Glen offers a number of responses, all worth reading, but here’s my favorite (followed by #5 and #4):

Waldfogel is committing the Nirvana fallacy – that is, condemning the market because it falls short of perfection. In this case, Nirvana is apparently a state in which all preferences are perfectly satisfied. That option is not on the table. So what institutional arrangement would do a better job? Would Waldfogel advocate having the government force firms to provide more options, despite the inefficiency of doing so (see #2 above)? Interestingly, Waldfogel blasts some market outcomes for how similar they are to the results of the political process! So the argument is that sometimes markets are almost as bad as government? Is this a serious criticism of markets, really?

Craig Newmark, another excellent economics blogger, asks what all this “long tail” stuff is about if the market is ignoring minority preferences? And here’s Justin Wolfers at Marginal Revolution on Waldfogel’s book.

Hello everyone!  I’m glad and excited to be a new part of Truth on the Market.  I’d like to thank Josh for inviting me.  Unfortunately, I’ll be very busy through the end of the year so I probably won’t get to post with great frequency, but I look forward to posting more in the future.

I want to note that I’m an economist, not a lawyer.  I worked in litigation consulting for a few years so I have a basic familiarity with antitrust law, but I don’t and won’t pretend to be an expert when it comes to matters of law.  My opinions will come from my economic perspective.

I got a random e-mail the other day from someone at a website called www.globalization.eu.  It occurred after my addition to TOTM, so I wonder if that had something to do with it.  Anyway, the e-mail made me laugh so I figured I’d share it with everyone in my first post.  The e-mail references the following document: http://www.globalisation.eu/publications/unbundlingmicrosoftwindows.pdf.  The author recommends that, to enhance competition, the European Union (EU) require that the Windows operating system not be “bundled” with computers.  In general, bundling is when a company sells two or more goods together for one price.  It can take different forms: pure, mixed, technical.

So, why did I laugh?  First, in my mind, bundling is something that a manufacturer may choose to do with its own products (e.g. bundling shampoo and conditioner, left shoes and right shoes, etc.).  Personally, I wouldn’t say that nails come bundled with the house, tires come bundled with the car, or Intel processors come bundled with the computer.  I would describe them as inputs purchased in a competitive (or reasonably competitive) input market.

Second, the idea that “Microsoft has over 90% market share so we need to allow consumers to choose so we can break into Microsoft’s dominance” is funny to me.  Do you know what else we need to do?????  We need to outlaw the “bundling” of Intel processors in computers so that consumer choice will bust up Intel’s monopoly power!  We have got to outlaw the “bundling” of iPod connectivity and stereo controls with automobiles!  It’s imperative that we outlaw the “bundling” of those darn nails with houses!  I know, I know……there’s not a dominant nail supplier so there’s no need for the latter.  Well, suppose there was, and one nail company had over 90% market share.  Would welfare be improved with a regulation “unbundling” nails from houses, giving consumers a choice?  No!  There’s already competition and choice in the market at the builder level.  On top of that, the end-consumer can still choose to purchase from alternative builders (or alternative auto makers or OEMs in the other examples) or not at all.  Nail companies compete to supply home builders.  Tire companies compete to supply automobile manufacturers.  Intel, AMD, and other processor companies compete to supply processors to OEMs.  If the end-consumers’ preferences are strong enough towards one brand or another, competition and consumer choice between home builders, auto makers, and OEMs will tend to induce them to adjust.  If consumers strongly prefer an alternative, cheaper operating system, do you not think OEMs, competing in an aggressive marketplace, trying to earn profits, will listen?

It’s not scientific, but here’s some anecdotal evidence.  I went to Dell’s website and, within a few clicks, found www.dell.com/open.  They offer Windows-free computers installed instead with Ubuntu Linux or FreeDOS.  The short video in the lower right-hand corner mentions that Dell chose to offer Ubuntu because of the large number of consumer requests on their suggestion box webpage.  So, markets really do tend to adjust to changes in consumer preferences?  Interesting.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that story.  It’s good to be here.  Goodnight, God bless, and Ubuntu…….

ProfessorBainbridge.com is up and running as a “hub” for Prof. B’s three blogs on politics, law and economics, and wine and food.  The new site looks pretty sharp too!  Go check it out.

TOTM is pleased to announce another addition to our permanent roster.  Paul Gift, Asssistant Professor of Economics at the Graziadio Business School at Pepperdine University.  Paul has a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA and spent several years in the litigation consulting business with LECG before moving into academia full-time at Pepperdine in 2006.  Paul specializes an antitrust economics and econometrics, but also has significant experience in financial fraud cases and damages estimation.  Welcome Paul!