People making decisions under uncertainty may need to justify those decisions to their reputational community. This Essay considers when and how the potential need to justify might lead a decision-maker to employ a methodology better suited to yielding a justifiable choice that may not be the...

The history of rating agency reform has not been inspiring. Until recently, it seemed stuck in an ever-repeating cycle of futility. A crisis would spur calls for reform, hearings would be conducted, the SEC would issue proposals and requests for comments, and ultimately, nothing would happen -...

In the present financial crisis, the government has become extensively involved in managing companies, at times undertaking massive bailouts. The results of government involvement in business are at best mixed. Moreover, its involvement has generated significant criticism. But government...

Law has spent surprisingly little time developing a theory of human nature. Its efforts have largely focused on the abnormal - notably, those not responsible for their actions by reason of mental illness or diminished capacity. The normal has barely been addressed. Law and economics embeds a...

This essay argues for the necessity of dealing with the market actors involved in the financial crisis - actors who committed no crimes, and cannot appropriately be demonized or viewed simply as bad agents making decisions in their short term interest but against their principals' interests....

Disclosure has its limits. One big focus of attention, criticism, and proposals for reform in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has been securities disclosure. But most of the criticisms of disclosure relate to retail investors. The securities at issue in the crisis were mostly sold to...

In this essay, we make a concrete proposal to limit the extent to which lawyers facilitate problematic transactions of the sort that contributed to, and may have caused, the financial crisis. We propose that the fees of securities lawyers and perhaps other regulatory lawyers such as banking...

Lines in the broader short versus long-term battle have been drawn between various camps: those favoring corporate management versus those favoring shareholder activists; those believing that corporations are best run for the exclusive benefit of shareholders versus those believing that other...

Taxation is one of the few things that we can take as a given in life. People will always look for ways to minimize the tax burdens that governments seek to impose on them. Indeed, there is a very well-developed industry devoted to that end. How should governments proceed? We develop an economic...

The financial crisis poses a challenge to orthodox theorists of markets and market participants. My talk will consider alternative views of how investors and markets behave. I consider the psychological dynamics implicated in the following questions: How do markets decide which financial...