Despite my best efforts, I didn’t manage to write posts about all the topics that caught my fancy during my turn as Student Blogger of the Month. So I’m treating (subjecting?) you to some quick hits on topics that I wanted to blog about but didn’t get to. What this boils down to is linking to some of the contents of my “blog” folder in my Internet bookmarks. I’m sharing these because I think I found some interesting topics that I didn’t get a chance to write about in a complete post.

Government thoughts

1)         I tried several times to put together a post inspired by a Chuck Klosterman article in Esquire entitled “You Say You Want a Revolution.” I never quite managed to make it work. In his article Klosterman wondered “what would have to happen before the American populace would try to overthrow its own government?” A little less dramatically, I wonder what would have to happen for the citizens of the country to amend our Constitution? We’ve had several events in the recent past (Bush v. Gore and the elections that led to it, the Clinton impeachment and perjury situation, Hurricane Katrina, 9-11) that might have been an impetus to fundamentally change the way our federal government works by amending the Constitution. But, we, as a country, have not chosen to take that step. What type of event would have to happen to lead to a Constitutional Amendment that could actually be ratified?

Welcome to April.  The new Faculty Blogger of the Month is Michael McChrystal.  The new Alum Blogger of the Month is Julie Darnieder.  And the new Student Blogger of the Month is Sean Samis.  Many thanks to our great featured bloggers for March: Andrea Schneider, Mike Zimmer, and Chris King.

The Question of the Month is: What was your most useful or enjoyable extracurricular activity in law school?

The collapse of the economy is the result of many different causes. There is plenty of blame to go around. For all too long, the government, under the spell of the mantra that “the government is the problem, the free market is the solution,” let much of the financial industry escape any real regulation by morphing into new forms of business that did not fall within the conventional regulatory schemes. As the Madoff and Stanford scandals show, the regulators gradually deregulated, through lack of vigorous enforcement, even in areas that are within their authority to regulate. As Judge Posner admitted recently, in that environment of rampant non-regulation, the Wall Street “Masters of the Universe” acted as he would expect, as “rational profit maximizers”: Unrestrained short term greed simply drove all good sense out of the market.

For example, most of the “credit default swaps,” and it appears much of the world of “derivatives,” is in fact gambling. Neither party to the swap has any connection to any actual economic activity. They are simply betting on the outcome of the actual economic activity undertaken by others.  In a world of rational regulation, no honest business would propose such a scheme because regulators would be expected to swoop in and determine these swaps to be what they are — unenforceable gambling contracts. Where was the accountability for those in the financial industry, the regulators and those in charge of the regulators who all acted so irresponsibly? A new structure of regulation and new regulators need to be put in place so that those with basic good sense have the reinforcement of prudent regulation.

Some of the blame seems wrongheaded.