Announcement:

The School of Law, Trinity College Dublin and McCann FitzGerald are delighted to announce the establishment of the McCann FitzGerald Chair in Corporate Law. This is a full-time permanent position in Ireland’s oldest and most prestigious Law School, and we are seeking applications from suitably qualified candidates in Corporate Law specialising in areas such as corporate governance or securities law.

Trinity College Dublin? Very cool.

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We would like to extend a warm welcome to Guest Bloggers Tom Fitzpatrick and Kathleen Engel, who will be with us for the next two weeks.  Tom is an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (with a law degree to boot) and Kathleen is Associate Dean for Intellectual Life and Professor of Law  at Suffolk University Law School.

(Please note the disclaimer that Tom gives that anything he writes in the blog is not the necessarily the opinion of his employer.)

Welcome, Tom and Kathleen! We look forward to reading their posts on consumer finance and more.

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I would like to thank The Conglomerate for giving me the opportunity to guest blog for the last two weeks. It was a truly wonderful experience, and I look forward to guest blogging again in the future!

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We are fortunate to have Diane Lourdes Dick guest blog with us for the next two weeks.  Diane recently joined the faculty at the Seattle University School of Law after practicing as a transactional lawyer.  She brings to her research and teaching both her experience as a tax lawyer and social science perspectives.  We look forward to reading her posts and learning more about her research. 

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Alas, my time here has drawn to a close - and I must regretfully bid the Glom's readership farewell.

It's been an honor and a privilege to be able to share my thoughts with you this way, and to be associated with The Glom as a "guest blogger." 

I hope you found my posts truly pathbreaking and stunningly insightful, and that you all see the world in an entirely different way as a result.  And if not, I hope, at a minimum, they didn't get too much in the way of your reading the genuinely fine posts that have populated The Glom over the past two weeks.

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We are happy to welcome my colleague Peter Huang to the Conglomerate for a two week guest stint.  Peter joined the University of Colorado law faculty this summer as the Demuth Chair.  His biography is too long to do justice in a short blog post.  His research interests include derivatives, law and economics, and law and the mind sciences.  We hope he'll discuss some of his work on topics such as law and emotions and law, happiness, and subjective well being.  I am sure his blogging will also draw on his vast knowledge of law, film, and other pop culture.

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We at the Glom are very pleased to welcome David Groshoff of Western State University College of Law.  Before law teaching, David was a Vice President at J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s high yield and distressed debt desk, and he has served on the boards of several public companies. He also has some interesting ideas for the classroom that I'm hoping he's share with us.

Welcome, David!

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Bill Callison is a practicing lawyer in the Denver office of Faegre & Benson. In additon to his busy law practice, Bill has maintained a consistent record of publication in law reviews over the course of his career. And for the next two weeks, Bill will be guest blogging at The Glom. Welcome, Bill!

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Thank you to our Masters for a great series of posts looking back on the Dodd-Frank Act after one year.  You can read all the posts here.  You can read the posts from last year's roundtable here.

Like Brett, I have been surprised not by the backlash against reform, but by how quickly it started and how it appeared on so many fronts.  From the moment the statute was signed, a fight loomed on the Consumer Financial Protection bureau and on debit card interchange fees.  Now there are fights against the Volcker Rule, credit retention in securitization, capital requirements (the Collins Amendment)...

What will financial reform look like next year at this time?

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The Dodd-Frank Act turns one today.  To mark the first anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Act, we will be hosting an online forum today and tomorrow on the statute and the regulatory projects it required. We have invited a large cast of law professors both from the current line-up of Masters, as well as the Masters from last year who participated in a forum at this blog one year ago when the Act was passed.

To mangle an Ed Koch quote: "How's it doing?"  

The first anniversary triggers a raft of statutory provisions going into effect.  For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today receives authority to enforce numerous consumer financial protection statutes.  The anniversary also marks the deadline for various rulemakings required by the Act.  It is fair to say that many rulemakings have suffered delays - minor and severe.  The delays can be attributed to multiple causes: the logjam as federal agencies struggle to churn out the sheer volume of regulations and studies that the statute requires, a desire to get tricky rules right and to mesh with one another, and resistance from some quarters of the financial industry, Congress and the federal bureaucracy itself.

The anniversary provides an opportunity to take stock of financial reform.  How have the myriad individual regulatory inititative fared?  It is high time for legal scholars to delve into the granular details of specific rules as opposed to pure "big picture."  What has worked well?  What has not? 

Aside from the substance of these rules, what does the course of rulemaking suggest about the administrative process, the legislative process, and the interactions of the two.  Taking a step back, what problems has the statute failed to address?  How should we assess efforts at Basel and elsewhere to coordinate regulation across borders?  What can we learn from European reform efforts?  The metastasizing sovereign crisis in Europe suggests that the financial crisis may not be over.  What new threats loom on the horizon in both the short and long run?  Most bluntly, what keeps our panelists up at night?

We academics also have a primal urge to advocate tearing down and starting over again.  That is, to be understated, not likely.  Where are the key pivot points that could dramatically improve or detract from reform?

Let's get going. 

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So my July is a disaster.  5 trips, no daycare the last 2 weeks of the month.  I'm expecting general insanity and probably not a lot of serious blogging for the month.  So I'll settle for a rant.  It was a minor happening from an early July trip, but it still rankles.

The trip planners put me in a boutique hotel that seemed nice enough.  You may know the type: euro chic design, assured staff that somehow manages to mix friendliness with the barest hint of condescension for the stray bedraggled academic that their earpiece-wearing doormen happen to usher in.  They answer the phone with awkward taglines like, "How I can I surprise you today?"

So I check in, have dinner with a friend, and am back at the hotel a little past my bedtime, only to discover to my dismay that I've forgotten my toothbrush.  I call down to the desk and am told that they do have toothbrushes.  For a $2 charge.

Two dollars?  Really? 

Honestly, it's not the money, which is clearly de minimis.  It's the fact that a hotel would expend so much effort to cultivate an air of "urban sophistication and style", exclusiveness, and "whatever/whenever" and then nickel and dime a guest at 11 pm at night over a toothbrush.  I'm not the most seasoned business traveler, but this choice seems obviously wrong from a business perspective. 

How can you surprise me, indeed.

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Thank you to our eminent group of contributors -- Brian Broughman (Indiana -Bloomington), Trey Drury (Loyola - New Orleans), Eric Helland (Claremont McKenna), Joan MacLeod Heminway (Tennessee), Karl Okamoto (Drexel), and our own Christine Hurt (Illinois) -- for a stimulating roundtable on teaching corporate finance.  I learned a great deal that will shape my own teaching. 

You can read all the Corporate Finance roundtable posts here.  You can also peruse the posts in our earlier teaching roundtables on Contracts and Banking/Financial Institutions.

Our next roundtable will focus on teaching Corporations and Business Associations and will take place on July 18-19.

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Today and tomorrow we continue the Conglomerate's series of summer roundtables on teaching business law courses with a roundtable on "Teaching Corporate Finance."  (Here are links to our earlier roundtables on teaching Contracts and Banking Law/Financial Institutions.)

We are joined by the following roster of distinguished scholars and teachers in the corporate finance area: Brian Broughman (Indiana -Bloomington); Trey Drury (Loyola - New Orleans); Eric Helland (Claremont McKenna); Joan MacLeod Heminway (Tennessee); and Karl Okamoto (Drexel).

Our panelists may take different approaches to teaching the course.  Some of them may not teach a "corporate finance" course.  Indeed many schools offer courses in Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship and Finance, Deals, or Analytic Methods for Lawyers that still incorporate core concepts involving the capital structure of firms. 

But there are still many choices to be made in approaching this subject matter.  Should the course focus on case law?  Should it introduce students to quantitative aspects of finance? What should we expect students to get out of the course?  (A question perhaps we could ask of every roundtable panel.)

As with earlier roundtables, we give our panelists free rein to talk about any aspect of teaching corporate finance.  Some of the topics they may discuss include:

• What are the core topics of the course as you teach it?
• Do you have a transactional focus to the course?
• Do you use simulations or problem sets? Case studies?
• How do you integrate finance theory and quantitative analysis into the class?
• Do you orient the course towards a particular type of transaction or type of company raising capital (e.g. start-up companies seeking financing, or venture capital)?  How important is debt?
• How does you course cover (or integrate with other courses in the curriculum that cover) topics like accounting?
• How much do you focus on the powers and duties of boards?  The rights of shareholders and debt holders?
• Where do you draw the boundaries among what should be taught in your course and what is/should be covered in other courses, like corporations, corporate governance, or securities regulation?
• How, if at all, has the financial crisis changed your course?
• Do you cover derivatives, asset-backed securities, and other structured instruments?
• How do negotiate the needs of students with no finance background with those with vast experience?
• What advice would you give to a rookie teacher?

Let's get started!

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Our thanks to our panelists for an insightful roundtable on teaching Banking/Financial Institutions.  As they noted it is a particularly challenging and rewarding time to be teaching and rethinking this course.  We heard from Adam Feibelman (Tulane), Anna Gelpern (American), Heidi Schooner (Catholic), and Arthur Wilmarth (George Washington).  We will hear from Lawrence Baxter (Duke) later in the summer.

You can access all of the Banking Roundtable posts here.  For all of the posts in last week's teaching Roundtable on Contracts, click here.

This coming Thursday and Friday (June 23-24) we will gather a distinguished group of teachers and scholars to convene a roundtable on teaching Corporate Finance.

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