Please send along comments, suggestions, warnings about broken links, etc.
Last updated on February 19, 2013.
** For hundreds of links to economics, politics/public policy, history, philosophy, etc., click here
________________
"It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the
answers."
-- James Thurber
"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers."
-- Voltaire
________________
I am currently developing a set of webpages for my summer class on "Legal
Process," open to incoming first-year students at Cumberland.
Comments
are welcome:
The
Core of American Law on a Single Page
The
Idea of "Natural Liberty" in the Founding Era
British/American
Legal Timeline
A
Hedgehog's Legal Glossary
A. Business Organizations
"A man is rarely more harmlessly employed than when
engaged in making money."
-- Samuel Johnson (1775)
I strongly recommend two very good, short, introductory essays on business and economics. The shorter of the two is Dwight Lee, Free Enterprise: The Economics of Cooperation (2002). Only slightly longer is Gwartney & Stroup's What Everyone Should Know About Economics and Prosperity. I urge all my students -- and particularly those with any student worry about his or her lack of prior exposure to the business world -- to, at the least, read these publications online. A hard copy of the latter may now be hard to come by, since it has been superceded by Common Sense Economics, by Gwartney, Stroup, and Dwight Lee (also recommended). A summary of "Ten Key Elements of Economics" by GS&L appeared in the Heritage Foundation's Insider, Spring 2005 (a PDF file).
An older text along these same lines is Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (1946).
Also recommended: the online
reference materials provided by The Economist magazine,
including
an economics
dictionary.
Investopedia.com offers a financial
dictionary.
The single most influential article on the subject is Ronald Coase, The Nature of the
Firm (1937).
Roberta Romano has written an excellent history of the transformation of the study of business organizations in the 1980s, After the Revolution in Corporate Law (2005). Amitai Aviram, A Note on Economic Theories of the Firm (2006) -- scroll down to "SSRN Electronic Paper Collection" and click on one of the icons under "Download the document from"
One of our casebook's co-authors, Stephen Bainbridge, daily updates a great legal web log, ProfessorBainbridge.com, that is devoted mostly to corporation and securities issues. Other useful blogs:The NY Times's extensive DealBook
blog is a great resource re: "mergers, acquisitions, venture
capital,
hedge funds,"
and includes The
Deal Professor edited by Steven Davidoff of the Wayne State
U.
law school.
Those of you interested in Alabama business news should read Business Alabama and the Birmingham Business Journal.
Federalist
Society's corporations, securities & antitrust practice group
Federalist
Society bibliography (scroll down to corporate law)
Jurist
subject guide to business organizations
Business
Resources on the Internet (U. of Pittsburgh)
Delaware Secretary
of State, Division of Corporations
Delaware Court
of Chancery
Institute
of Delaware Corporate & Business Law (Widener U.)
Delaware
Corporate & Commercial Litigation Blog
Implied
Terms & Interpretation in Contract Law (Cohen, in
Encyclopedia
of Law & Econ)
Vicarious
& Corporate Civil Liability (Kraakman, in Encyclopedia of Law
&
Econ)
Limited
Liability (Carney, in Encyclopedia of Law & Econ)
Insider
Trading (Bainbridge, in Encyclopedia of Law & Econ)
ABA
Section of Business Law
Association of
Corporate
Counsel
U.S.
Chamber
of Commerce
National
Federation of Independent Business
Foundations
of Business Law (Babson College)
The Role of Business in the Modern World (David Henderson, IEA, 2004). A British economist answers anti-globalist and other critiques of capitalism and the corporation. You can download the entire 200-plus page text as a PDF file, free of charge, by scrolling to the bottom of the page I've linked.
Business history is treated in two recent TV
series: History Channel's The Men Who
Built America (Carnegie, Ford, Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt) and
PBS's The
Titans (Ford, the Rockefellers).
For more insight into Unocal v. Mesa
Petroleum,
check out the T. Boone Pickens
Archive.
Encyclopedia
of Corporate Governance
OECD
Corporate
Affairs Directorate (European (mostly) super-bureaucrats)
The
Corporate Library (Nell Minow) (includes the very useful Patterson
Report, a digest of articles on corporate
governance)
Eight
New Columnists on Yahoo Finance re personal
investing/success.
Read them regularly!
Getting
Rich in America: A Few Easy Rules to Follow (Richard McKenzie
& Dwight Lee)
Guide
to Personal Finance (Malcolm Getz, Vanderbilt U.)
NY
Stock Exchange educational materials
Investor's
Business Daily learning center (teach yourself the basics of
investing)
The Motley Fool
(includes
the Fool's School, self-teaching materials re investing)
Marketplace
Money (Public Radio program on personal finance and
investing)
Personal
Finance Calculator (from WebMath)
Efficient
Frontier (personal investing from Birth of Plenty author
William Bernstein)
Heilbrunn
Center for Graham & Dodd Investing, Columbia Business School
Entrepreneurship: Law (on the Kauffman Foundation's entrepreneurship website)
Contingency
Analysis (Glyn Holton's site includes useful "Risk
Glossary")
Finance
teaching web page (Prof. Aswath Damodaran, NYU business school)
Jim
Garven Weblog (Baylor finance prof's blog on risk management,
insurance
and finance topics)
Forbes
Magazine
Business
Week
Fortune
Magazine
The
Economist
Joint
Economic
Committee of the U.S. Congress (good source for current/recent
macro
data)
Securities
Class Action Clearinghouse (Stanford Law School)
EDGAR
(the SEC's database of corporate information)
The
Securities Lawyer's Deskbook (U. of Cincinnati law school)
U.S. Securities
& Exchange Commission
Federal
Tax Law
Tax Reform
Now
Bankruptcy
research database (large Chapter 11 cases) (Lynn LoPucki,
UCLA)
Railroads:
The First Big Business; American Economic History; and Entrepreneurs
and
American Economic Growth
(fascinating course materials
by economic historian Keith Poole, of UC San Diego)
Contracting
and Organizations Research Institute (work in the Coasian
vein,
at the U. of Missouri)
International
Society for New Institutional Economics
1990
Nobel Prize in economics to H. Markowitz, M. Miller & W.
Sharpe
1997
Nobel Prize in economics to R. Merton & M. Scholes
see also Ronald Coase interview and Nobel
Prize, and Eric Posner, Agency Models in Law and Economics, in Econ
Analysis
of Law (Section IV of my
links page)
B. Administrative Law
Public Law Process
(summers)
Legal & Social
Environment
of Business
(Samford
MBA Program)
Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India
rubber, would never manage to bounce
over the obstacles which legislators are continually
putting in their way; and, if one were to
judge these men wholly by the effects of their
actions,
and not partly by their intentions, they
would deserve to be classed and punished with those
mischievous persons who put
obstructions on the railroads.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849)
I strongly recommend two very good, short, introductory essays on business and economics. The shorter of the two is Dwight Lee, Free Enterprise: The Economics of Cooperation (2002). Only slightly longer is Gwartney & Stroup's What Everyone Should Know About Economics and Prosperity. I urge all my students -- and particularly those with any student worry about his or her lack of prior exposure to the business world -- to, at the least, read these publications online. A hard copy of the latter may now be hard to come by, since it has been superceded by Common Sense Economics, by Gwartney, Stroup, and Dwight Lee (also recommended). A summary of "Ten Key Elements of Economics" by GS&L appeared in the Heritage Foundation's Insider, Spring 2005 (a PDF file).
An older text along these same lines is Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (1946).
Also recommended: the online reference materials provided by The Economist magazine, including an economics dictionary.
Master
list of US Gov't departments and agencies
RegInfo.gov
"Where to find Federal Regulatory Information"
FedStats.gov,
"statistics from more than 100 agencies"
Administrative
Procedure Act (APA) & other federal admin law resources
The Federal Register and the Code of Federal
Regulations are on the GPO's
Federal Digital System
U.S.
Office of Management & Budget materials on regulatory policy
How
to Convince an Agency, by James Long (1982)
Meet the
Deciders (portrait of median voter), by Daniel Foster (2012)
Primer
on Regulation, by Susan Dudley & Jerry Brito (2d ed. 2012)
The Federalist Papers (on Yale Avalon Project)
The US Code and much Congressional material
are on the GPO's Federal Digital
System.
THOMAS
(federal legislative information, maintained by Library of Congress)
(Federal) Legislative
History Process (U. of Michigan library)
State Legislative History: Research Guides on the Web (Indiana U. library)
How
Our Laws Are Made (by U.S. House Parliamentarian)
Enactment
of a Law (by U.S. Senate Parliamentarian)
What Is Public Choice Theory? (by Nobel laureate James Buchanan, 2003)
Statutory
Construction Blog (an earlier blog's 2002-2005 archive is here)
Proposal for a "Restatement
of Statutory Interpretation" (2004, pdf file)
State legislatures: Alabama
Florida
Georgia
Roll Call
magazine
Congressional
Quarterly
Campaigns
and Elections magazine
Center
for Competitive Politics (former FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith)
and
its blog
the Election
Law website at the Ohio State law school
Election Law
blog
Skeptic's
Eye campaign finance law blog
Michael Munger, Unintended
Consequences 1, Good Intentions 0 (2006; critique of BCRA)
see also the sites under Public Choice Theory
(Section
V) and Public Policy Debates (Section VII) on my
links page
Re Hunter v.
City of Pittsburgh (1907): Decision of the Pa. supreme
court, 66 A. 348 (Pa. 1907)
"A
Giant Forged" (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, June 11, 2006)
Allegheny, PA
with 1898 map
Historic Pittsburgh
digital library at Pitt
Greater Birmingham
campaign of 1910
The city
of Byram, Mississippi (as of 2009)
The
Border Line and the Bottom Line: The Economics of Municipal Annexation
(Richmond Fed, 2005)
William Fischel's
homepage at Darmouth
Webpage
on The Homevoter Hypothesis
AEI
program, September 2008, on the Jefferson County financial disaster
-- audio, video, written materials.
Birmingham
on the brink (of bankruptcy) -- Fortune magazine, October 2008
Kyle Whitmire's Second Front blog covers
B'ham and Jefferson County
Edward Galeser's webbed publications (Harvard)
Eric
Hanushek's homepage at Stanford (education spending and quality)
Overview
of the Municipal Bond Market (from The Fundamentals of Municipal
Bonds (5th ed. 2001))
Ten
Principles of Privatization (Gilroy & Moore, for the Heartland
Institute and the Reason Foundation, 2010)
Great map/satellite photo sites:
Google
Maps
Yahoo Maps Beta
National Geographic MapMachine
2000
Census (official site)
American
Factfinder (census gateway, easy-to-use)
City-Data.com(mostly
census data, but presented in very useful format)
ePodunk
(ditto,
includes collection of old postcards)
Social Science Data
Analysis Network (Michigan) (includes CensusScope
site)
Census
Bureau info on state & local goverment finance
International
City/County Management Association
State
and Local Legal Blog at the Stennis Institute of Government, Miss.
State U.
the Election
Law website at the Ohio State law school
Election
Law blog
Law
of the Land blog on land use law and zoning
Edward
C. Banfield -- An Online Resource
E. Real Property (spring 2012)
Though my heart be left of centre, I have always
known that the only economic system that
works is a market economy, in which everything
belongs
to someone -- which means that
someone is responsible for everything. It
is a system in which complete independence and
plurality of economic entities exist within a legal
framework, and its workings are guided chiefly
by the laws of the marketplace. This is the
only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense;
the only one that can lead to prosperity, because
it is the only one that reflects the nature of life
itself.
-- Vaclav Havel,
"Summer Meditations on Politics, Morality and Civility
in a Time of Transition" 62 (1992).
Havel, a playwright, was a leading anti-Soviet dissident in pre-1989
Czechoslovakia. He then served as President of Czechoslovakia
from 1989 to 1992, and President of the Czech Republic from
1993 to 2003. (For more, click
here.)
Federalist
Society bibliography (scroll down to property)
Jurist
subject guide to property and wills/trusts
Glossary of Probate Terminology (EstateFinance)
How
the Pilgrims Made Progress (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 25, 2005)
Tom Bethell, How
Private Property Saved the Pilgrims (1999)
13
Originals: Founding the American colonies (charters, maps)
John Locke, "Of
Property," in Two
Treatises of Government (1689)
James Madison, Property
(1792)
Daniel Ernst, Pierson
v. Post: The New Learning (2009)
Bethany Berger, It's
Not About the Fox: The Untold Story of Pierson v. Post
(2006)
Angela Fernandez, James
Kent and a Pedagogical Theory of Pierson v. Post: It's Really Not About
the Fox (abstract, 2006)
Dharmapala & Pitchford, An
Economic Analysis of "Riding to Hounds": Pierson v. Post
Revisited
(2002)
Battle
of Hastings (short explanation and some links from the BBC)
Essential
Norman Conquest (very cool)
Jeremy
Bentham page (click here
for the "Auto-Icon" -- why is there no webcam??)
Bentham's
ideas (see esp. the section on "Political Philosophy")
Great
article on customary, common and statute law, from John Hasnas (PDF
file)
Great
lecture on England and the common law by philosopher Roger Scruton
(MP3 file)
Some updated info on the house at issue in Stambovsky v. Ackley (pp. 484-88)
Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom: The
Inseparable
Connection (FEE, 2004; audio file; requires Windows Media Player) (the
introduction of Pipes begins at about 7 minutes into the file; his
remarks
begin at about 11 minutes in).
Tibor Machan, The
Right to Private Property (2002)
Terry Anderson & Laura Higgins, The
Essential Right (2002)
Terry Anderson & Laura Higgins, Property
Rights: A Practical Guide to Freedom and Prosperity (2003)
Hernando
de Soto, Citadels of Dead Capital (Reason magazine, May 2001)
Hernando de Soto interviews 1994
and 2001
Hernando
de Soto wins Friedman Prize for Liberty (Cato Institute, 2004)
Steven Shavell, Economic
Analysis of Property Law (PDF file; 137 pages; 1.6MB) Six
chapters
from Shavell's book, Foundations of Economic Analysis of Law
(Harvard
U. Press, 2003), provided free, in draft form. Shavell, a member of the
Harvard Law School faculty, is one of the most highly regarded writers
in the field of "law and economics."
ABA
Section of Real Property, Probate & Trust Law
Land
Use Law (Daniel Mandelker, Wash U-St. Louis law school)
Planning
and Markets (USC e-journal re planned interventions versus market
approach)
Elinor
Ostrom on common property resources, etc.
Digital
Library of the Commons (at Indiana U.)
International
Association for the Study of the Commons (also at IU)
Private
and Common Property Rights (Ostrom, in Encyclopedia of Law &
Econ)
Nuisance
(Swanson & Kontoleon, in Encyclopedia of Law & Econ)
Zoning
& Land Use Regulation (Fischel, in Encyclopedia of Law &
Econ)
William
Fischel's website (Dartmouth)
Fischel's photos of property at issue in Lucas (1995)
and (2000)
Takings
(Miceli & Segerson, in Encyclopedia of Law & Econ)
Renting
(Hirsch, in Encyclopedia of Law & Econ)
see also Ronald Coase interview and Nobel
Prize, in Econ Analysis of Law (Section III of my
links page)
Michigan Supreme Court decision in County
of Wayne v. Hathcock (2004; PDF
file)
Institute for
Justice
(market-oriented, public-interest law firm)
The
Castle Coalition (anti-eminent domain organization)
Clint Bolick, Leviathan:
The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty (2004)
Propertyrights.org
F. Antitrust Law
"[T]he Sherman Act is a humbug based on economic
ignorance and incompetence. . . ."
-- Mr. Justice
Holmes, in private letter to Sir Frederick Pollock, 1910
"Antitrust laws in general, and the Sherman Act
in
particular, are the Magna Carta of free
enterprise."
-- Mr. Justice
Marshall,
in U.S. v. Topco Associates, 1972
I strongly recommend two very good, short, introductory essays on business and economics. The shorter of the two is Dwight Lee, Free Enterprise: The Economics of Cooperation (2002). Only slightly longer is Gwartney & Stroup's What Everyone Should Know About Economics and Prosperity. I urge everyone -- and particularly those with any worry about his or her lack of prior exposure to the business world -- to, at the least, read these publications online. A hard copy of the latter may now be hard to find, since it has been superceded by Common Sense Economics, by Gwartney, Stroup, and Dwight Lee (also recommended). A summary of "Ten Key Elements of Economics" by GS&L appeared in the Heritage Foundation's Insider, Spring 2005 (a PDF file).
An older text along these same lines is Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (1946).
Also recommended: the online reference materials provided by The Economist magazine, including an economics dictionary.
Federalist
Society's corporations, securities & antitrust practice group
Federalist
Society bibliography (scroll down to antitrust)
** Our
casebook's web site
Antitrust
Case Browser (St. Olaf College)
Supreme
Court Antitrust Debates (Ripon College)
U.S.
Department
of Justice, Antitrust Division
Federal Trade
Commission
ABA
Section of Antitrust Law
Competititve
Enterprise Institute
Antitrust
Policy (Luke Froeb's page, currently down)
Merger
Policy Home Page
American
Antitrust Institute (a good source for antitrust news)
Yahoo
page on antitrust & trade regulation news
good
antitrust links page (from American Antitrust Institute)
Shenefield & Stelzer, The
Antitrust Laws: A Primer (AEI, 4th ed., 2001) -- full text
available
in PDF
Internet resources re U.S. v. Microsoft:
Yahoo
full coverage (many links)
Jurist
guide to Microsoft litigation
BBC
News coverage (including extensive, day-by-day reports on the trial)
Reason
Magazine
Mises
Institute
Thomas
Sowell (on MS case, and antitrust generally)
links
to foreign antitrust bureaucracies (including European Union)
OECD's
competition policy website
Competition
and Regulation Bulletin (from London Economics consulting
firm)
G. Environmental Law
see also section B, above, for
administrative
law materials
Federalist
Society bibliography (scroll down to environmental law)
Overlawyered.com
environmental law resources
Jurist
subject guide to environmental law
Environmental
Law Teachers' Clearinghouse (lots of links)
Pace
Law School environmental program (includes Environmental Law
Library)
Citizens for
a Sound Economy
Competitive
Enterprise
Institute
Defenders
of Property Rights
Foundation
for Research on Economics and the Environment
Political
Economy
Research Center
Center
on Environmental and Land Use Law (NYU)
Garrett Hardin, The
Tragedy of the Commons (1968)
Garrett Hardin, Extensions
of 'The Tragedy of the Commons' (1998)
Robert Stavins, Environmental
Economics (2004) (a brief survey)
Peter
Huber,
Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists
(info on the
recent book, and magazine and newspaper columns by Huber on
environmental
policy)
Bjorn Lomborg is the author of "The Skeptical
Environmentalist." A former Greenpeace member, Lomborg
"challenges
widely held beliefs that the world environmental situation is getting
worse"
and "documents that the world has actually improved." He
concludes
"that there are more reasons for optimism than pessimism," "stresses
the
need for clear-headed prioritization of resources to tackle real, not
imagined,
problems," and "offers a non-partisan evaluation that serves as a
useful
corrective to the more alarmist accounts favored by campaign groups and
the media.") The Cambridge University Press website for the book
is here.
Lomborg's
personal website is here.
Terry Anderson, You
Have to Admit Its Getting Better: From Economic Prosperity to
Environmental
Quality (2004)
Jonathan
Adler's home page (Case Western environmental law professor)
The
Commons (an environmental web log)
Free-Market
Environmentalism Reading List
2004
Index of Leading Environmental Indicators From the
Pacific
Research Institute.
U.S.
Environmental
Protection Agency
U.S.
Department of Justice, Environmental & Natural Resources Division
U.S. Department
of the Interior
U.S. Bureau of
Land Management
Alabama
Department of Environmental Management
for a local take on things, see Bama
Environmental News
see also Ronald Coase interview & Nobel
Prize, in Econ Analysis of Law (in Section IV of my
links page)
H. Legal Process (summers) -- Click
here.
** MCL students:
CLICK
HERE for more links em portugues, espanol, English.
I. Analytical Methods for Lawyers (summers)
See also on my
main links page,
section III.F for materials on game theory and experimental economics
section III.A1 and III.A2 for materials on basic microeconomic theory
section IV for materials on economic analysis of law
section III.D for materials on statistics
Stephen Bainbridge, First,
Kill All the Transactional Lawyers? (2007)
Deals
homepage at the Columbia Law School
Victor Fleischer, Deals,
2002 Columbia Business Law Review 475
Victor
Fleischer's Home Page at U of Colorado
Syllabi of bizecon
courses at UCLA
Professor Klein's course, Contractual
Arranagements in Business (1997)
Business
Law & Policy Program at UCLA Law School
MIT economics graduate
course
in Advanced
Contract Theory
Fundamentalfinance.com
("personal finance and economics")
Wharton
Finance and Investment Research
Encyclopedia
of Finance
Finance
teaching web page from Prof. Aswath Damodaran of the NYU business
school
Market
Movers finance blog
Jim
Garven Weblog re "risk management, insurance, and finance"
RiskProf
blog on "liability law and economics" from Martin Grace at Georgia
State
U.
J. Freedom,
Prosperity, and Faith (Samford
undergraduate,
spring 2001)
K. Undergraduate
honors seminar on the Scottish Enlightenment (spring
2010 & spring 2005)
L. Law and
Economics (Econ 430, Samford undergraduate); Links
to podcasts and blogs for students in my undergraduate economics classes
(and anyone else who's interested).
M. Introduction
to Jurisprudence (Political Science 444, Samford
undergraduate, spring 2012)