Excursus on the Beatles
posted by Frank Pasquale
I once heard a forlorn graduate student put a $20 bill in her dissertation in 1978, and when she returned to campus 20 years later to see if anyone had read her magnum opus, the bill was still there. Given that some proportion of law review articles never get cited, authors of the “long tail” of legal scholarship may want to develop some strategies to see if their own works are getting read. One strategy appears below the fold….
In the course of reading a footnote on the prudent man rule in a note discussing the liability of ratings agencies for bad ratings (75 Cornell L. Rev. 411), I found the following extended discussion of the Beatles:
For an excellent discussion of the infirmities of the prudent man rule, see . . . John Lennon & Paul McCartney, “Dear Prudence,”’ The Beatles, (Columbia Records 1968) (detailing the Beatles’s objections to the prudent man rule).
The members of the Beatles were well known advocates in the fight to abolish the prudent man-they called him a real “No Where Man.”’ By ignoring the dictates of prudent investing, they were able to amass sizeable fortunes. They also wrote numerous songs in the fight to adopt a better set of fiduciary management rules, including “ERISA in the Sky with Diamonds,”’ “A Day in the Life of a Trust Fund Manager,”’ “The Ballad of John and Yoko’s Money,”’ “Back in the ERISA,”’ and, of course, “Dear Prudence,”’ an open letter to their mutual fund director, which later was set to music and became a hit in A major. In addition, they wrote numerous songs giving investment tips to the record-buying public. “Penny Lane”’ was a nostalgic look back on the penny stocks, while “‘Magical Mystery Bourse”’ touted the advantages of investing on the Tokyo stock exchange.
“I’ll Follow the SUN,”’ which outlined John’s contrarian strategy of investing based on the acronym, Stocks Undervalued Now, was the first major work questioning the strong form of the efficient capital markets hypothesis. George Harrison, too, was a rock economist: for example, “While my Accountant Gently Weeps”’ outlined his despair at seeing his prudently invested trust funds losing their value. Even Ringo Starr joined the crusade for a better prudent man rule, recording “She’s 16, She’s Beautiful, and She’s Mine,”’ which told the story of his investment in Lockheed, which he bought at exactly one-fourth of its previous high of 64. The contrarian investment later soared.
Although the Beatles later broke up because of a fight over whether they should invest in tax-free municipals or high-growth equity investments, John Lennon and Paul McCartney did see eye-to-eye on the need for a better prudence standard. John Lennon released the poignant “Imagine,”’ which painted the idyllic world where economics and efficiency would be the goal of all people, in the investment world or elsewhere. His words, as meaningful today as they were a decade and a half ago, were:
Imagine there’s no prudence,
It isn’t hard to do,
No U.S. bonds for us,
Higher returns too.
Imagine all the people,
Investing for today.
You may think I’m a dreamer,
But I’m not the only one,
We hope someday you’ll join us,
With alphas over one.
A cold realist, John also released the haunting “Cold Turkey,”’ the story of his agony when his subscription to the Wall Street Journal was inadvertently cut off due to post office error.
It is time to acknowledge the contribution of these young millionaires to the financial scene. Although their music no longer tops the charts, their investment strategies still top the financial charts. Every fund manager today owes these visionary rock economists an enormous debt that she cannot hope to repay, even with high-yielding, imprudent junk bonds.
Anyone want to send in their favorite “excursus” footnotes? The hyperfootnoted law review article may be a genre ripe for satire, and even, as in this piece, Dadaist revolt. (Hat tip for the Spam piece: Michael Madison.)
PS: The ratings agency article actually isn’t even part of the uncited long tail–it’s been used as authority in at least a couple cases.
June 22, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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Responses (1)
Victoria Pynchon - June 23, 2007 at 6:11 pm
Remember feminism? “It isn’t hard to do” when you’re over 50. I recall this case from law school — a concurring opinion of Supreme Court Associate Justice Thompson in Medovoi v. American Savings.
“As I analyze the ovular FN1 case of Coast Bank v. Minderhout (1964) 61 Cal.2d 311, 38 Cal.Rptr. 505, 392 P.2d 265, Justice Traynor, in speaking for a unanimous court . . . (etc.)”
“FN1. The feminists among us are entitled to a word other than ‘seminal.’”
Those were the days!
Cheers!
Vickie Pynchon
http://negotiationlawblog.com
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