The good people behind Scotusblog have said that they have a hard time posting daily between July and October, when the Supreme Court spends much of its time lecturing in Europe.  At least Supreme Court buffs have Jeffrey Toobin to kick around.  Consider the plight of the DC Circuit afficianado.  No exposes about that court in the offing (though there was a marriage), and no opinions since August 24.  New clerks are coming in, summers are taken off, but I think the lesson for agencies is clear: time your interim final rule for July, and revel in at least three months of pre-opinion effectiveness.

Rumor has it that it is possible that EPA has already learned this lesson.

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We’re not afraid to be servicey here at the Glom. Perhaps you’ll indulge me in the occasional round up of international and regulatory news of note?

Canada thinks the EU’s ban on seal products violates national treatment obligations, and has filed suit at the WTO. The idea is that this might help to focus the rules set forth in the famous Shrimp-Turtle dispute in defining when countries can implement environmental protections that also disadvantage foreign trading partners.

Congress is still working on a bill to punish China for keeping its currency cheap. The economists are angry, and so is the Club for Growth. We await news of how Wal Mart – or the consumers it targets – feel[s]. Here is more on the strange economist lineup.

On Friday, the SEC passed a rule defining when managers have to report problems in with their SOX internal controls to auditors and the board. They must do so, inter alia, when they discovery a significant deficiency, which is “A deficiency, or a combination of deficiencies, in internal control over financial reporting that is less severe than a material weakness, yet important enough to merit attention by those responsible for oversight of the registrant’s financial reporting.”

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Today marks the end of my two-week guest-blogging stint. Thanks again to my Glom hosts for the opportunity. It was a lot of fun, and I now have even more admiration than I did before for those who blog on a regular basis!

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I’m a daily reader of Conglomerate, and it’s been really fun to guest blog here for a short while. I very much thank Gordon, Christine, Vic, Fred, and Lisa for the opportunity. I’m also thankful for the many helpful comments on my posts.

In closing, I had the pleasure of spending the last few days in Austin for the much-touted conference on empirical legal studies. It did not disappoint. There were numerous corporate/finance sessions with presentations by leading scholars including Roberta Romano, John Coates, and Steve Choi. I learned a lot, and also got to spend some time with former guest blogger Bobby Bartlett (Georgia), who is an extremely nice person and full of good ideas.

Events like this remind me that this job is the best thing going. Thanks again to all.

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Thanks so much to the Glom for inviting me to guestblog for the past couple of weeks. Blogging has been a heady experience, a little daunting and a whole lot fun. Daunting because the posts on Conglomerate are of such consistently high caliber, and because I’d never so much as braved a comment to a blog before. Fun for pretty much the same reasons. Thanks especially to the folks I’ve met or reconnected with over email and through comments. I must confess that now I’m ready to sink back into obscurity (and drafting), leaving the blogging once more in the capable hands of the pros. Thanks again!

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ProfB has an interesting post on the wisdom of crowds versus the wisdom of experts.  One of the intriguing aspects of the Internet has been the democratization of authority.  Thirty years ago, if you were writing a paper for school, you found facts and support for your paper in written materials.  They seemed authoritative because well, it was printed professionally.  Surely hacks couldn't get things published.  Now, research is done online, and any hack can publish something online (look at us!).  We also used to go to the encyclopedia, which carried an authoritative weight second to none.

Today, the WSJ reports that Encyclopedia Britannica is defending itself from a short piece in Nature that compares Wikipedia quite favorably to the venerable encyclopedia.  EB is disputing not only the "errors" that the Nature authors claimed were found in EB (some did seem to be judgment calls) but also the very idea that the lay people that contribute to Wikipedia could compete with its expert researchers.  The Wikipedia people are being very classy about the whole thing and concede that EB has the advantage over certain areas:

He says he was glad Nature chose to compare science-related themes "because on history and the social sciences, we're much weaker." In other areas -- including computer science and the history of "Star Trek," he says, Wikipedia is "way better."

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I missed the Thanksgiving blogging yesterday while at the Magic Kingdom, so I have to impart in a time-lapse way my Thanksgiving story.  My 4 year-old asked me a few months ago "what is Thanksgiving again?"  So, I told him the "Father Guido Sarducci" version of a people who lived in a place where they weren't free so they went across the ocean to a place where they could be free.  Life was hard, but after a year they had a great harvest and celebrated with a big feast to give thanks to God to bringing them to this place.  Luke's response:  "Is this the story with the Pharoah?"

Of course, this put my mind into a cynical spiral where I wondered if all these stories were just recurring mythologies of persecution and destiny.  A friend stopped my spiral by telling me that the similarities in the stories were not evidence of mythological underpinnings but merely evidence of the recurrence of bad Pharoahs.

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I would like to thank Gordon, Christine, and Vic for letting me float some ideas on the Conglomerate.   The regular bloggers are excellent on this site.  But during the last ten days, I came to appreciate how much readers add to the mix.  This is a remarkably civil and intellectually engaging corner of the blogosphere.  And it is obvious that forums like Conglomerate are altering (and, in my opinion, enriching) the academic dialogue, especially when practicing lawyers, students, and non-legal readers chime in with good ideas and reality checks.

That said, I look forward to continuing my regular role as a reader and commenter.  Have a good weekend, everybody!

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A friend of mine sent me Confessions of a Slacker Mom for Mother's Day, but I'm more "really bad mom" than "slacker mom" today.  I took my two kids to the dentist this morning, and my 3 year-old has a cavity.  I would have thought that you would need to have your tooth in your head a year or two before it could get a cavity.  The dentist says that juice is the culprit -- children under five should have no more than 4 ounces of juice a day.  Yikes.  So, I'm pretty sure this goes on my permanent record.

And I don't even want to know how you give a 3 year-old a filling.  I'll find out a week from tomorrow.

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I am ill today.  I was a little sick yesterday, but I taught my classes, so today I am home.  I am always reminded of the practice of law, where we worked whether we were sick or not.  Of course, this meant that we were all sick quite often because everyone came to the office with all their germs.  A female partner explained to me one day, "It's not how well you work.  It's how well you work sick."  That was not in the brochure.

I'm glad to be in academia today.

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Joke Variations

Eugene Volokh tells a funny joke about a academic quid pro quo offer gone awry. As I was scrolling through the joke, I was expecting the joke to be a variation I heard zillions of years ago. I may have even read it in Reader's Digest or something. I appreciate it a lot more today.

A beautiful woman walks over to a gentlemen in a suit, sitting at a bar.

"For $300, I'll do whatever you ask me to."

"Anything?

"Anything. You just have to tell me to do it in three little words."

The man took out his wallet and put $300 on the bar. "Paint. My. House."

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I finally learned how the word "fisking" came into the blogospheric lexicon. Did you know?

If you are curious, you might also want to check here and here.

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This spring and early summer have been hectic, and I am grateful to be home again. Wisconsin can be really lovely in the summer, at least on days that aren't too humid and when the mosquitoes are subdued. Today was one of those days.

This was a big day for our family because my 16-year-old daughter earned her driver's license. We spent part of yesterday practicing parallel parking, and today we learned the fine points of a Y-turn. Talk about cramming! Anyway, she seems like a fine driver, but I am as nervous as I can be about this.

Now that all of my grades are finally in (apologies to all of the spring students who had to endure the delay, which is unprecedented for me), I am looking forward to completing a couple of symposium articles, and I am excited about the prospects for the new blog, Law & Entrepreneurship News, which I will be producing with the help of some student editors. Applications have been pouring in, and we should have an editorial board within a week.

Do I miss Germany? Some things. I like having the chance to speak German, unless I don't know the vocabulary, and then I get frustrated. I miss being able to watch the Euro Cup matches. I miss the great cheese section of the local grocery store, which made even Whole Foods and Brennan's look a bit skimpy. But it is nice to be back home again.

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Two loose ends:

* My April Fool's Day post about Vice-Chancellor Strine apparently caused quite a stir in the real world, not just in cyberspace. Larry Ribstein is reporting that a hard copy was circulating at the ABA Business Law Meeting in Seattle. According to Larry, "it seemed that some people were taking it seriously." Oy!

* Recent events in Falluja again raise the issue of entrepreneurship in Iraq, which I blogged about here. The BBC offers this post-Falluja report.

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