A two week trip, including stops on the way back in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Posting will be light, but I may have some comments on the local scene or on earthshaking business-related developments back home.
Archive for the ‘administrative’ Category
From Ideoblog to TOTM
Posted by Larry Ribstein on May 19, 2010
After six years on Ideoblog I have decided to move my act over to Truth on the Market. I’m taking this momentous (for me, if not the rest of the world) step for three reasons.
First, I’m joining a great bunch of writers, some of whom I’ve known for a long time. TOTM offers what I could not – a full-service blog with the complete range of business-related topics, all written with an appreciation of how markets operate.
Second, this group site provides a good opportunity to do some things I didn’t really have the resources for operating all alone, particularly including symposia on hot topics.
Third, I am hoping to reach a broader audience. I’m happy with the exposure I’ve gotten on Ideoblog but alas, there are still too many wrong-thinking people in the world! I’d like to get my ideas out before the regulators have crushed what’s left of capitalism. With object in view, I will also be writing weekly on Forbes.com, cross-posted at TOTM. More on that later.
I’m looking forward to joining Todd, Thom, Geoff, Mike, Jay and Josh.
Posted in administrative, announcements, blogging | 2 Comments »
Apologies and comments
Posted by Geoffrey Manne on May 5, 2010
Dear readers: Apologies for our site’s absence yesterday. Apparently we were the target of a Russian spam attack. We’re back up, but we’ve had to close comments for the time being (except from the TOTM authors and previous guests who may login to post a comment). We’re working to get everything up and running again as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you’d like to post a comment, please email it to one of us (our email addresses are available from the “Email” page) and we’ll post it as soon as we can. Thanks for your patience.
Posted in administrative, truth on the market | Comments Off
Blaming the D.C. Circuit for Regulatory Failure?
Posted by Josh Wright on April 9, 2010
Washington Post columnist Steve Pearlstein offers a novel explanation for “regulatory failure.” The D.C. Circuit, has, Pearlstein asserts, “has intimidated, undermined and demoralized the regulatory apparatus” by giving insufficient deference to regulators and “opinions that routinely ignore the plain language of statute and the clear intent of Congress.” Pearlstein holds up three Republican appointees as examples of this sort of runaway anti-regulatory judicial activism. Strong stuff. What’s the evidence? Pearlstein relies on the recent Comcast v. FCC, an opinion authored by Judge Tatel (Clinton appointee, in case you were wondering). It is also worth noting that two of the judges cited have taken senior status and only Kavanaugh joined recently. Pearlstein then refers to the D.C. Circuit’s review of the Federal Trade Commission’s case against Rambus. He describes it as follows:
And last year, Judge Williams went through 24 pages of hair-splitting logic to explain why the Federal Trade Commission was out of bounds when it tried to discipline a tech company for enhancing its monopoly in a certain chipmaking process by deceiving an industry standard-setting body. According to Williams, the fact that its deceit “merely” enabled a monopolist to charge higher prices doesn’t constitute illegal anti-competitive behavior.
Eh, I don’t think Rambus supports Pearlstein’s thesis at all. Turns out, a monopolist engaging in deception that “merely” results in higher prices but does not exclude competitors is not the world of antitrust law according to Judge Williams, but is the state of antitrust law according to the Supreme Court’s 9-0 unanimous decision in NYNEX. As I point out in Why the Supreme Court Was Correct to Deny Certiorari in FTC v. Rambus, if Rambus had ex ante monopoly power prior to its allegedly deceptive acts, even assuming that those acts resulted in violation of RAND commitments and higher prices, NYNEX commands that an antitrust violation requires injury to the competitive process and not just increased prices. There can be reasonable debate over whether the D.C. Circuit was correct that the FTC did not meet its burden of showing the requisite exclusion and the occurrence of an illegal act not immunized by unanimous Supreme Court law. But the critique that the D.C. Circuit was willy-nilly avoiding the law here is misplaced.
Posted in administrative, antitrust, federal trade commission, regulation | Comments Off
The other shoe
Posted by Geoffrey Manne on April 1, 2009
Michael Carrier’s response to the symposium contributions will be up a bit later today. We’re all anxious to see his remarks, so be sure to check back soon!
Posted in administrative | Comments Off
AEA Meeting
Posted by Geoffrey Manne on January 2, 2009
I’m off to the American Economics Association meeting in San Francisco tomorrow. Any of our loyal readers attending who want to try to meet, please let me know. Happy New Year!
Posted in administrative, announcements | Comments Off
Bill's News
Posted by Geoffrey Manne on December 28, 2008
There’s good and bad news for Truth on the Market, and I wanted to share both with our loyal readers.
The good news: Bill, co-founder of this blog and stalwart of our early blogging days’ focus on securities regulation and corporate law and governance, has accepted a new, senior position at the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law. This is great news for Arizona–Bill is a tremendous scholar and a great colleague. We heartily congratulate Bill on this well-deserved move, and we look forward to hearing more about his career from his new perch.
The bad news: With his new move and new responsibilities, Bill has decided to give up blogging (for the time being at least). We will miss Bill’s insights and wealth of knowledge, as I’m sure our readers will, as well. Bill is always welcome to return to Truth on the Market–the blog began as a gleam in Bill’s eye and a generous invitation to me to join with him in starting the blog, and I am forever grateful to him for the opportunity.
Bill will become our first blogger emeritus, and his login will remain for whenever the spirit moves him.
Congratulations, Bill, and best of luck!
Posted in administrative, announcements | 2 Comments »
Tulane Corporate Law Institute
Posted by Elizabeth Nowicki on March 21, 2008
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 20th 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.
Posted in administrative, announcements, corporate law, mergers & acquisitions | Comments Off
Law Review Submission Season Is Almost Upon Us. Maybe.
Posted by Elizabeth Nowicki on February 18, 2008
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?
Posted in administrative, announcements, blogging | 12 Comments »
My Take on Credit Suisse . . .
Posted by Keith Sharfman on June 29, 2007
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.
Posted in administrative, antitrust, contracts, corporate law, economics, federal trade commission, federalism, IPOs, law and economics, markets, securities litigation, securities regulation | 1 Comment »
