On Monday, BloggingHeads posted a discussion between Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law Eric Posner and The University of Connecticut's Steven Davidoff about "Economic Ants and Grasshoppers," in which they discuss where blame for the current economic crisis lies, and what could and should be done about it. A portion of the discussion is embedded below, or you can watch the whole discussion here.
On the current edition of the Intellectual Property Colloquium podcast, hosted by UCLA (and former Chicago) professor Doug Lichtman, Paul H. and Theo Leffmann Professor of Commercial Law Randy Picker discusses digital rights management with Princeton's Ed Felten. According to Ben Sheffner's Copyrights & Campaigns blog,
You can listen to or download the podcast here.
On Tuesday, John P. Wilson Professor of Law Brian Leiter was a guest on WNPR's show, "Where We Live." Together with Danielle Citron and Senator Gary LeBeau, he discussed the extent to which First Amendment protections should be extended into cyberspace.
On their website, WNPR sums up the conversation:
You can listen to the show here.
Over the past week, the National Review Online has been posting portions of a video interview with Richard Epstein as part of "Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson," produced by the Hoover Institution. Links to the week's episodes are below. Update: The Hoover Institution has the full video, along with a transcript.
Last week, Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law Eric Posner recorded a conversation with Yale's Jack Balkin on the Bloggingheads.tv site on "The Politics of Emergency." Among the topics covered were: executive power in a time of emergency, whether the president can change reality, secrecy in the Obama administration, and imagining an executive branch 2.0. The video is embedded below, or can be watched on the Bloggingheads site.
Update: Audio of this talk is now available and video is embedded after the jump.
Professor Omri Ben-Shahar spoke on the "Myths of Consumer Protection" at this year’s annual Ronald H. Coase lecture for first year law students. Ben-Shahar discussed why he believes the modern consumer protection movement is largely misguided. Consumer advocates cite three things that consumers need: information about products, access to courts, and remedies for wrongs done to them. In the eyes of the consumer advocate, a consumer cannot compete with large corporations without these three things. It would be David versus Goliath; and Goliath would always win.
Myth #1: Consumers will be better off if they have more information
Warning labels are on everything. You can’t install a piece of software or use a web site without checking some box guaranteeing that you have read the Terms of Service. Do these forms of disclosure benefit consumers?
Ben-Shahar believes not. Disclosures of information are often technical and hard to digest. People do not want to spend the time to read these disclosures. In a study of online viewing habits, 1/1000 people actually read a site’s Terms of Service, and that single curious individual only glanced at the complicated contract for an average of forty seconds—perhaps just a misclick.
Continue reading "Student Blogger - The Myths of Consumer Protection Law" »
Earlier this month, Columbia Law School held a symposium honoring Martha Nussbaum's contributions to the scholarship of gender, sexuality and the law. The proceedings will be published in a special issue of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, but videos of Prof. Nussbaum's keynote and the symposium panels (one of which featured Chicago's Mary Anne Case) are now available on Columbia's Gender & Sexuality Law Blog.
Late last year, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics Martha Nussbaum and Harry Kalven Visiting Professor of Law Cass Sunstein organized a conference devoted to an interdisciplinary discussion of the legal and ethical issues posed by the new ways in which privacy can be invaded. "Speech, Privacy, and the Internet: The University and Beyond" brought together leading scholars to discuss these topics. As the conference webpage states,
The current rise in invasive personal gossip, much of it anonymous and much of it directed at students, often by other students, creates an atmosphere that threatens to disrupt the climate of instruction. On the other hand, restrictions on such internet sites raise delicate free speech issues. What challenges do these developments raise on campus, and what direction should universities take to meet these challenges?
Video of the conference keynote address, by former Chicago professor Lawrence Lessig, is embedded after the jump. The video also includes intros from Profs. Nussbaum and Sunstein and Provost Thomas Rosenbaum. You can read the University News Office story about the conference here. Audio downloads, abstracts, and selected papers are available here.
Continue reading "Conference: "Speech, Privacy, and the Internet: The University and Beyond"" »
This week's edition of the Faculty Podcast is a double header of two recent Chicago's Best Ideas talks: Judge Diane Wood and Martha Nussbaum February 2nd discussion "Constitutions and Capabilities," in which the pair discuss practical implications for judges of Prof. Nussbaum's capabilities approach; and Richard Epstein's "The Coming Meltdown in Labor Relations," in which he discusses the Employee Free Choice Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act.
You can read Bryan Hart's summary of the Nussbaum/Wood talk here, and download the audio here; Bryan's write-up of the Epstein event is here, and the audio is here.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or with its RSS feed.
In September, Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law Omri Ben-Shahar and Fischel-Neil Visiting Professor of Law Ariel Porat organized a conference intended to reevaluate the role of fault in contract law. Speakers included Chicago faculty Saul Levmore, Eric Posner, Richard Epstein and Judge Richard Posner, along with experts in contract law from around the world. Subscribers to our Faculty Podcast may have already heard Judge Posner's "Let Us Never Blame a Contract Breaker," and audio and video of the entire conference is now available on the conference website. You may also watch Professor Ben-Shahar's introduction to the conference in the video embedded after the jump.
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