Dave Hoffman aptly describes the contours of a lot of the blog debate over Brian Leiter’s citation rankings of law professors by specialty:

Objection: “But you didn’t measure X…”
Leiter: “True. Let a hundred flowers bloom, and do your own data collection!”

I’ve got to say, I’m not sure that I really understand any of the objections to Leiter’s provision of this service. I suspect my initial reaction to the rankings was not unlike many law profs — I perused the rankings to look for scholars in my primary field: antitrust.

Read the full piece here. 

Over at Antitrustworldwiki.com, Keith Hylton has a very cool wiki project compiling antitrust laws around the world.

Read the full piece here.

I recently came across a keynote speech by Frank Easterbrook (published at 52 Emory L.J. 1297 (2003)) where he discusses Type I errors in antitrust cases.  Easterbrook, of course, produced the fundamental insight for antitrust enforcement that competition itself constrained the costs associated with false negatives while false positives were likely to ripple throughout the economy.  The argument is frequently raised that those concerned with false positives overestimate both their frequency and impact.

Read the full piece here.

Professor Bainbridge offers a correction to Keith’s Starbucks analysis by pointing out that Starbucks does not have franchisees. I don’t think the franchise/ franchisee distinction has much to do with Keith’s conclusion that whatever is going on is not an antitrust problem. But the Professor is on to a really cool question about franchising and vertical integration.

Read the full piece here.

U of Chicago Law Professors Douglas Baird and M. Todd Henderson (my very smart, very tall law school classmate) recently posted a provocative paper on SSRN. The paper, Other People’s Money, contends that “the oft-repeated maxim that directors of a corporation owe a fiduciary duty to the shareholders” is an “almost-right principle that has distorted much of the thinking about corporate law in recent decades.” Baird and Henderson argue that we should scrap this “almost-right” but mischief-causing principle in favor of a principle that would ground duties to all investors in contract.

Read the full piece here. 

The debate over the whether the current Supreme Court’s decisions are more accurately described as influenced by the Chicago School, the Harvard School, Post-Chicago thinking, or other influences has recently attracted a great deal of scholarship from premier antitrust scholars (e.g. FTC Commissioner William Kovacic’s article on the identifies a Chicago/Harvard double-helix structure in the intellectual foundations of antitrust law, Commissioner Rosch finds Chicago’s fingerprints on the recent SCOTUS decisions but reserves hope that this influence is diminishing in the lower courts, and Herbert Hovenkamp’s (Iowa) paper arguing that dominant firm antitrust jurisprudence reveals the prominent influence of the Harvard School).

Read the full piece here.

Bill tells the story of his research team’s failed attempt to get data from the California Bar to test a possible mismatch effect in law schools. Bill’s prepared remarks are here. He sums up the case for disclosing the data aptly at the end of his post…

Read the full piece here. 

Danny Sokol points to Spencer Webber Waller’s “The Chicago School Virus.”  Given the paper’s title, the fact that I’ve written previously on the irresponsible or misleading usages of the term Chicago School, and the author’s predilection to take shots at the Chicago School more generally (previous attempts include describing Hovenkamp’s recent movement toward Chicago School views as imposing the “thinking man’s death sentence” on the U.S. antitrust system), I was pleasantly surprised by the paper. The paper is really about why the Chicago School succeeded in some substantive fields of law and not others. It is quite careful to avoid cheap mischaracterizations of the intellectual content of the Chicago School, and much more importantly, Waller offer some interesting insights about why certain intellectual movements succeed and fail in different areas of law.

Read the full piece here.

Eric Gould and Todd Kaplan have posted an interesting paper (highlighted at the WSJ Economics Blog) identifying the “Canseco Effect.” They test baseball player Jose Canseco’s impact on his teammates productivity in response to Canseco’s assertion in his book that he made he improved his teammates’ performance by introducing them to steroids. Turns out he was right about the improved performance. Gould & Kaplan find that teammates’ performance did in fact increase after playing with Canseco, an impact which they report is quite rare in baseball. Whether it was a result of introduction to steroids or some alternative mechanism is up to debate.

Read the full piece here.