As noted earlier this week, Jayne Barnard of William & Mary will be blogging about the Madoff sentencing next week. Jayne is well known to many of our readers, and we are grateful that she is going to provide us with some onsite coverage and commentary about the sentencing.

Today we welcome another guest blogger, Mehrsa Baradaran, a young banking law scholar from New York. Mehrsa graduated from NYU Law School in 2005, then worked as an associate for three years at Davis Polk & Wardwell, where she had a wide-ranging corporate practice. Since leaving the firm, she has been working on her budding academic career, including a paper on Industrial Loan Companies -- Banking Like it's 1929: The ILC and the Reconstruction of U.S. Banking, 10 Nev. L.J. __ (forthcoming 2010) -- which I blogged about a few weeks ago. This fall Mehrsa will start a fellowship at NYU, so look for more of her work soon.

She also is taking a keen interest in the current events in Iran, and I hope she will share some insights on that with us while she is here. Welcome, Mehrsa!

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Last fall J.W. Verret of George Mason University School of Law spent a couple of weeks with us, and he has been a busy fellow since then. Among other things, he has been commenting on the financial crisis, including testimony before the House Oversight Committee with the CEO of AIG, Ed Liddy, and the three trustees designated by the Federal Reserve Bank to manage the taxpayer's investment in AIG. We are grateful to have J.W. back with us for the next two weeks. Welcome, J.W.!

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Christine and I have been tweeting away on The Glom since last June, but that Twitter account does not capture posts from the blog. If you want to follow The Conglomerate on Twitter, subscribe to our new account, GlomPosts.

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Andrew Lund is Associate Professor of Law at Pace Law School, where he teaches and writes about corporate and securities law. Andrew is particularly interested in the recent Delaware case Ryan v. Lyondell, and we look forward to some illumination on the fiduciary duty of good faith over the next two weeks. Welcome, Andrew!

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We are pleased to welcome Benjamin Means, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law, as a guest blogger for the next two weeks. Ben, a brand new law professor, has a forthcoming article in Georgetown Law Journal on minority shareholder oppression, as well as a few new ideas I hope he'll kick around here on the Glom. Welcome, Ben!

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The Conglomerate was again included in the ABA Journal's top 100 best websites by lawyers, and we are very honored. This is from the press release:

"New legal blogs are springing up on a daily basis – we now have more than 2,000 in our online directory. Competition for the time and attention of lawyers is getting fiercer," says Edward A. Adams, the Journal’s editor and publisher. "Half the blogs on last year’s inaugural Blawg 100 list didn’t make the cut this year. That’s a testament to the quality of this year’s honorees, and evidence of the increasing amount of valuable information all legal blogs are publishing."

But the funnier part is their description of our blog:

The Wall Street crisis has kept these law profs focused on the blog’s marketing pitch: business/law/econom­ics/society. We all hope to be as relevant and analytical. But these profs aren’t all work and no play—their Twitter feed, “The Glom,” is a riot.

If you would like to vote for our blog -- please do! -- you can find the voting page here.

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We are thrilled to be welcoming Michelle Harner, Assistant Professor of Law of the University of Nebraska College of Law, to The Conglomerate for the next two weeks. Michelle has extensive practice experience in business restructuring, insolvency, and bankruptcy, which have become the focus of her academic research. Something tells me she is going to stay very busy over the next few years, and we look forward to this opportunity to learn from her. Welcome, Michelle!

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We are pleased to welcome Shubha Ghosh, Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, as a guest blogger for the next two weeks. Shubha took my place as Associate Director of the Initiative for Studies in Technology Entrepreneurship (INSITE), where he writes and teaches about intellectual property theory and policy, competition policy, legal theory, and institutional analysis of markets and legal institutions. Welcome, Shubha!

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We are very pleased to welcome longtime Glom reader and commenter Jeff Lipshaw as a guest blogger for the next two weeks. Jeff is Associate Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School, where he teaches courses on business organizations and securities regulation. He also blogs regularly at the Legal Profession Blog.

After a long career as a practicing attorney, Jeff has become a prolific scholar, a transition he discusses in his much-downloaded piece, Memo to Lawyers: How Not to 'Retire and Teach' (which I highly recommend to those suffering from the delusion that they might want to retire from law to teaching). Jeff has also done something else with his scholarship that I highly encourage: he has taken a debate on The Conglomerate and turned it into an article, which in turn credited the blog discussion as inspiration in the first footnote. Thanks, Jeff! And welcome to The Conglomerate as a guest blogger!

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We are thrilled to welcome Christiana Ochoa, Associate Professor of Law at the Indiana University School of Law -- Bloomington as a guest blogger. According to her web bio, Christiana's "research concentrates in two interconnected areas: the role of individuals in law formation and the inextricable links between global economic activity and human rights." We are looking forward to her reflections on current developments in those areas and any other topics that strike her fancy. Welcome, Christiana!

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Longtime Glom friend Mike Guttentag has been prompted by the financial crisis to accept our standing invitation to guest blog. Mike is an Associate Professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, and his recent scholarship bears on the subprime meltdown and the bailout legislation. We are very much looking forward to reading Mike's views on the latest developments. Welcome, Mike!

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Anna Gelpern joins us as a guest blogger at an auspicious time. Anna is Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law - Newark, where she studies the legal and policy implications of international capital flows.  I first became acquainted with Anna through her excellent article (co-authored with Mitu Gulati) entitled Public Symbol in Private Contract: A Case Study," 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1627 (2006). Her most recent publication is Domestic Bonds, Credit Derivatives, and the Next Transformation of Sovereign Debt, 83 Chi.-Kent. L. Rev. 147 (2008). We are thrilled that she is joining us, and we look forward to her insights on the financial crisis and other topics that strike her fancy.

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We are very excited to welcome Karl Okamoto to The Conglomerate for the next two weeks. Karl is Associate Professor of Law and Director of Business and Entrepreneurship Law Concentration at Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law. He has had a fascinating career, with stints at Skadden, Kirkland & Ellis, and Dechert (he was a partner at the last two firms), as well as serving as a consultant for Soros Fund Management and senior managing director for Atticus Capital LP. He is always thoughtful and provocative, and we hope he can help us sort out this mess on Wall Street. Welcome, Karl!

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My good friend Christian Johnson is joining us as a guest blogger for the next two weeks. Christian recently moved from Loyola University Chicago to the University of Utah, and I am thrilled to have him in the neighborhood. As an expert in all things futures, Christian may be able to help us sort out some of the wild events of the day. Welcome, Christian!

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RSS may be the single greatest invention of the Internet age. I have been using Google Reader since "Going Google" in the spring of last year, and I have been proselyting the virtues of RSS feed readers ever since. If you read material from multiple sources on the Internet and you don't use a feed reader, do yourself a favor and try it. Of course, your first subscription should be The Conglomerate!

While you're at it, sign up for our new Facebook Blog Network and our new LinkedIn Group. Blog Networks are entirely new to Facebook, and we are interested to see how they evolve, but we need to attract a minumum number of Facebook Readers (20) before all of the features will work. LinkedIn has had groups forever, as far as I can tell, but only recently has LinkedIn added the capability to create discussions. Again, we are not sure whether that will have any value to us as we grow The Conglomerate community, but we would like to keep an eye on it.

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