Over the past few months, I have been thinking fairly intensely about entrepreneurship education. As you undoubtedly know, entrepreneurship studies are of relatively recent vintage, and they tend to be confined to business schools and economics and engineering departments. It's a shame.

Law should be a much bigger part of the mix because it plays a central role in shaping most entrepreneurial activity. I suspect a great deal of the blame for this omission should be placed on lawyers. To date we have not used "entrepreneurship" as one of the myriad categories to organize our study of law. As a result, when entrepreneurship scholars think about law in connection with entrepreneurship, they usually think about patents or trademarks, but this is too narrow a coneption of the role of law.

We lawyers have a lot to offer to entrepreneurship scholars, most of whom (in my experience) are woefully ignorant of the legal structures -- not just partnerships, corporations, LLCs, etc., but also the contractual relationships -- that shape much entrepreneurial activity. I plan to do something about this, but I cannot disclose it here. Not yet. I hope to have something more substantial to say on this subject by the end of next summer.

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