The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

The End of Bailouts

Not in real life—those will be with us for some time unfortunately—but the end of the seminar. I think that we all learned a great deal. Yesterday, we heard five more student presentations: Madoff; Continental Illinois; Sweden; Ratings Agencies; and Consumer Mortgage Issues. Very much worth downloading and reviewing.

Bailing Out the Bailouts

The economy continues to struggle and we are doing do-overs on the first wave of bailouts. In the bankruptcy world, we talk about Chapter 22s and Chapter 33s—firms that have been in Chapter 11 bankruptcy two and three times. Unfortunately, as the case of AIG seems to suggest, we need a similar nomenclature for bailouts (AIG 3.0no?).

If a seminar can be simultaneously lively and depressing, we have hit that mark in the bailouts seminar this quarter (David Weisbach may have done so also in his climate change seminar). The class bailouts blog is full of interesting posts. Last week, student presentations started and we heard about AIG; LTCM; Japan; Iceland; and municipal financial distress. If you are interested in getting a better handle on any of those situations, download the slides and go to some of the materials that the students have put together at the blog.

Student Blogger - Shared Intuitions of Justice: Nature or Nurture?

Say you have a disagreement with someone over a newly emerging claim in the field of punishment theory—a problem many of you, no doubt, struggle with often. How could you express it? On the streets of Chicago, you might voice your disagreement by yelling the loudest or resorting to physical violence. In the highly evolved world of academia, however, you write a paper. The last Crime and Punishment Workshop was host to one such disagreement when Professor Donald Braman of the D. Brakahffman—Braman, Dan Kahan, and David Hoffman—trio was on hand to discuss their latest (as of yet unpublished) paper. The subject of the disagreement? The claim that humans have an innate sense of justice.

For regular readers, that subject should be familiar. Last November, the Workshop hosted Professor Paul Robinson of Penn Law, who presented results suggesting that humans share intuitions of justice across political and cultural divides, and that these intuitions may be innate. In their paper, Brakahffman critique such claims of "punishment naturalism" (i.e., the notion that shared intuitions of justice are explained by evolutionary biology), and offer an alternate approach, which they term "punishment realism."

Corrections to recent posts

Due to technical problems, portions of Richard Steinberg's posts "Future of the WTO: Regionalism, Multilateralism, and Global Governance" and "Future of the WTO: Noise versus Trend" were accidentally deleted; these posts have been now been restored to their original form. We apologize for the inconvenience.