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. 

The Searle Center at Northwestern University School of Law will be holding a conference on this subject starting a week from today on Thursday, November 15th.  I’m very much looking forward to participating.

Read the full piece here.

The results are in: Radiohead did . . . ok.  Before I share the specifics, let me remind you of what one seemingly prescient prognosticator said a few weeks ago:

My prediction: They will receive an average price of $2 and a median price of $0. 

So what happened?

Read the full piece here.

From the NY Times:

Federal regulators on Wednesday approved a rule that would ban exclusive agreements that cable television operators have with apartment buildings, opening up competition for other video providers that could eventually lead to lower prices.

The Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved the change, which Chairman Kevin Martin said would help lower cable rates for millions of subscribers who live in apartment buildings and other multi-unit dwellings, or about 25 million households. He said the move would particularly help minorities who disproportionately live in multi-unit dwellings.

What is at issue here is the exclusive contracts between cable operators and the owners of “multiple dwelling units” (MDUs). From what I understand, the FCC order appears to prohibit the enforcement of both existing and new exclusive arrangements with MDUs as anticompetitive contracts. It is well known in the economics literature that exclusive contracts, and competition for access to consumers through the use of exclusives, can generate significant pro-competitive benefits.

Read the full piece here.

I’ve done some more thinking about my recent post on the problems associated with claims that infer greater antitrust enforcement quality solely from enforcement activity and come to the conclusion that my post oversimplified matters. I remain rather skeptical about this inference but wanted to highlight some of the nuances in the debate that I skimmed over in the previous post. In the spirit of highlighting some of these issues, and because I’ve always wanted to try one of these posts, here’s a hypothetical dialogue between myself (JW) and an anonymous economist with a more interventionist bent (AE) in the spirit of highlighting some of the complexities of the potential link between enforcement activity and consumer welfare…

Read the full piece here.