Following the Conglomerate's excellent forum on Jones v. Harris, let me focus not on the details of the case but on the Posner angle that first caught many people's attention. It was startling to see Judge Posner, avatar of law & economics Chicago-style, argue for imperfections in the mutual market and adopt some behavioral arguments. Posner's book on the crisis (how does he write so fast?) garnered attention, in part, for the spectacle of a high priest committing heresy.

If Richard Posner is rethinking whether (and when) financial markets work, will there by a broader round of soul searching in the corporate law corner of the academy? Shouldn't there be? I've been to a number of larger conferences and workshops in the past year where one member of the audience or another has asked what responsibility scholars bear for the crisis. (It happened at the beginning of the AALS Mid-year meeting in Long Beach.) I don't think the questioners meant to single out individual scholars, but I wonder to myself whether there is some tectonic shift coming in legal scholarship coming after the crisis. Wouldn’t it be surprising if there wasn't one? Paul Krugman argued a few weeks ago for a Big Rethink in macroeconomics. And Gordon mentioned Adolf Berle in a post yesterday. Consider that Berle's most influential scholarship stemmed in large part from the intellectual crisis in our field caused by the Great Depression.

This ties back to one of the provocative questions during the AALS mid-year conference, which might be paraphrased as where is the next big idea or movement coming from in corporate law? At the risk of being repeating old Glom posts, I thought I'd try to reopen discussion on these questions.

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