The Uncorporations Conference was a huge hit with the participants. I just returned to Wisconsin after eating a whole slab of ribs next to Steve Bainbridge and Larry Ribstein, among others. Larry assembled a great cast of participants, and I was flattered to be invited. Henry Butler and John Coates offered useful comments on my still nascent ideas on strategic alliances. This paper still needs a lot of work, but I am glad to be working on the project, which I find interesting.

Steve's paper on abolishing veil piercing generated lots of comments, including an exchange with Judge Frank Easterbrook that reminded me of being in Easterbrook's Antitrust class 15 years ago. Scary how those experiences stick with you.

Speaking of Judge Easterbrook, he gave the lunch talk. Of course, he was talking about some issues on which I have some independent views, and he seems much less intimidating than he seemed as a student. I still have a hard time calling him Frank. Anyway, his work in corporate law has always seemed a bit superficial to me, and today's talk was no exception. He asks interesting questions, but his answers are of the meat cleaver variety.

For most of the day, I sat between Steve and Saul Levmore, dean of my alma mater, the University of Chicago Law School. (He didn't hit me up for a donation.) I was interested to see that both are two-fingered typists. Can you believe that? How does Steve produce all of that volume with two fingers? By the way, he is a two-forefingered typist, but Saul uses one forefinger and one middle finger. As you can see, I was immersed in the presentations.

During his talk, Saul mentioned how much he "loved that term 'sacred space' coined by Steve Bainbridge." I am happy to report that Steve and Lynn Stout and others immediately corrected him, pointing to my paper with Bob Thompson as the source of that term. Steve disagrees with the notion of sacred space, which he finds inconsistent with director primacy. I am not sure I see the conflict, but I will leave that for another day.

Two other papers deserve special mention. First, I very much enjoyed was Rob Sitkoff's paper on trusts. He has found a nice niche, and he is teaching all of us some new things. Second, my longtime friend Kim Krawiec and her UNC colleague Scott Baker presented a paper on the conversion of New York law firms from general partnerships to limited liability partnerships. Most interesting was their finding that many firms have resisted converting out of reputational concerns.

There was a lot more, but I am too tired to write it up at the moment. Time to sleep.

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