Kevin Phillips on Money Politics

What explains the simultaneously record-low approval ratings of a President and the very-low approval ratings of a Congress controlled by his political enemies? One simple answer is that a party without 60 votes in the Senate does not actually control Congress, as this Lithwick piece on the filibuster of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act makes clear. But Kevin Phillips's new book Bad Money suggests a darker possibility:

Most office holders on both sides seem to rest easier if everyone stays away from uncomfortable themes, even ones in the headlines, like costly U.S. overreach in the Middle East; the reckless expansion of private debt, as well as the federal budget deficit variety; the new economic (and political) dominance of the financial sector; and the mounting probability that the nation will have to choose between desirable energy supplies and global warming measures. . . .

Washington, D.C., Ottawa, and Canberra. . . have become shorthand in their respective electorates for (1) metropolitan areas with strikingly high (and recession-resistant) per capita incomes; and (2) hothouses of seething interest-group concentration where elected representatives, shedding whatever grassroots fealty they may once have possessed, often train to retire after ten or twelve years to triple or even quintuple their salaries by becoming lobbyists. . . .

[T]he United States has progressed to a new kind of interest-group influence: the simultaneous entrenchment in Washington of the used-up, don't-want-to-go-back-to-Peoria elites of both major parties. This electoral duopoly is in turn protected by various state and federal election and campaign-finance laws that make it hard for new parties to take hold or flourish. It's not that there aren't differences between the parties; it's just that they are limited differences and ones often reflecting cultural polarization.

So what's next, in Phillips's view? Here's a summation drawn from a positive review of Bad Money:

"My summation," Phillips writes, "is that American financial capitalism, at a pivotal period in the nation's history, cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling U.S. credit-market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of dishonesty, incompetence and quantitative negligence."

Phillips bases those worries on, among other things, the fact that over "three decades, financial services have expanded from 11% of America's gross domestic product to a record 21%, while manufacturing has declined from 25% to 13%." I look forward to reading the book to seeing how he critiques these comparative numbers (a theorist like Richard Rosencrance would likely see a rise in financialization as a good thing). But given the current crises in food, oil, and even some water supplies, and the extraordinary unemployment greater globalization could bring to the US, a more autarkic economy may have to be "on the table" for serious policy analysts.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 09:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Eagles Sue T.O.

The Philadelphia Eagles have sued Terrell Owens to force him to repay nearly $770,000 in bonus money that an arbitrator determined that he owes the team. I downloaded the complaint, given my long-standing interest in this particular contract dispute. Turns out, it looks like a relatively routine request to enforce an arbitration award, rendered in January 2008.

Still, the clerks for Judge Tucker must be hoping that there are enough unexpected and interesting legal issues in the suit to merit at least one appearance by T.O. in the courtroom. (I'd imagine that his sharpie maneuver wouldn't play all that well in federal court, but you never know, signatures sometimes really matter.)

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 01:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Financial Products Safety Commission

As we deal with the consequences of housing and consumption arms races, Elizabeth Warren's article on "Making Financial Products Safer" is a must-read. Warren notes:

It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance your home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting your family out on the street—and the mortgage won’t even carry a disclosure of that fact. Similarly, it’s impossible for the seller to change the price on a toaster once you have purchased it. But long after the credit-card slip has been signed, your credit-card company can triple the price of the credit you used to finance your purchase, even if you meet all the credit terms. Why are consumers safe when they purchase tangible products with cash, but left at the mercy of their creditors when they sign up for routine financial products like mortgages and credit cards?

Warren proposes that a new federal agency start regulating credit from a consumer safety perspective:

[W]hy not create a Financial Product Safety Commission (FPSC), charged with responsibility to establish guidelines for consumer disclosure, collect and report data about the uses of different financial products, review new products for safety, and require modification of dangerous products before they can be marketed to the public? The agency could review mortgages, credit cards, car loans, and so on. It could also exercise jurisdiction over life insurance and annuity contracts. In effect, the FPSC would evaluate these products to eliminate the hidden tricks that make some of them far more dangerous than others, and ensure that none pose unacceptable risks to consumers.

An FPSC would promote the benefits of free markets by assuring that consumers can enter credit markets confident that the products they purchase meet minimum safety standards. A commission could collect data about which financial products are least understood, what kinds of disclosures are most effective, and which products are most likely to result in consumer default. It could develop nuanced regulatory responses; some credit terms might be banned altogether, while others might be permitted only with clearer disclosure. A commission could promote uniform disclosures that make it easier to compare products, and to discern conflicts of interest on the part of a mortgage broker or seller of what are now loosely regulated products. For example, an FPSC might review the following terms that appear in some—but not all—credit-card agreements: universal default clauses; unlimited and unexplained fees; interest-rate increases that exceed 10 percentage points; and an issuer’s claim that it can change the terms after money has been borrowed. It would also promote such market-enhancing practices as a simple, easy-to-read paragraph that explains all interest charges; clear explanations of when fees will be imposed; a requirement that the terms of a credit card remain the same until the card expires; no marketing targeted at college students or minors; and a statement showing how long it will take to pay off the balance, as well as how much interest will be paid if the customer makes the minimum monthly payments on the outstanding loan balance.

As I've noted here and here, the federal CPSC may not exactly be a model here. It could easily turn into one more preemption machine. But given the "race to the bottom" dynamics common generally, federal regulation may be the only solution.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 02:42 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Adultery, Divorce & the Criminal Law

It looks like Eliot and Silda may be staying together after all. For a couple who has long been in the public spotlight, having a hot dog together in Central Park was surely a intentional display of a marriage on the mend. Is this surprising? Is this only to be expected? The statistics on adultery in this country vary widely from as low as 20 percent to as high as 75 percent of married people having engaged in adulterous sex. Many of these adulterous acts are discovered by spouses and many marriages undergo the difficult times now being experienced by the former governor and first lady of New York.

As a family law professor, I always ask matrimonial practitioners whether in their experience, divorce can be avoided after one spouse has cheated on the other. Their answers are always the same and sound true to life: some marriages can overcome an act of adultery while some cannot. What seems to matter are the underlying reasons that led the guilty spouse to stray. If the adultery involves emotional or spiritual bonds, it is a much harder road to forgiveness. Selective forgiveness makes sense on the personal level when two people are trying to sort out their marital relationship. Does it make sense on a societal level?

Americans have long been divided on how to deal with adultery as a societal phenomenon. Interestingly, this difference of opinion has led to selective forgiveness on a societal level. For example, David Paterson succeeded Eliot Spitzer and at his first new conference, Governor Paterson revealed that he too had committed a crime in his past: the misdemeanor of adultery. Certainly there were differences on substantive, procedural and political levels between the two men’s marital mistakes. However, as the New York Times noted, it is important to recognize that both patronizing a prostitute and committing adultery are crimes and yet only Eliot Spitzer is vulnerable to criminal prosecution. Admittedly, adultery has rarely been prosecuted in New York but as Sanford Kadish warned long ago, one of the great dangers of overcriminalization is the selective enforcement of our penal laws. Selective enforcement, of course, necessarily entails selective forgiveness.

In addition to the exercise of discretion by law enforcement as they scrutinize the conduct of individuals, it is also clear that entire categories of individuals are held to higher standards of behavior. Politicians, celebrities, and professional athletes are our leaders, role models and public icons and many believe that they should suffer the wrath of the criminal law even for minor crimes of morality that would ordinarily not be prosecuted if committed by us ordinary folks. Ordinary people are privileged as society largely forgives their adulterous acts.

I want to note one final irony that results from the divided opinion on the public policy question of adultery. Although adultery is a misdemeanor in some states including New York, it is a dead criminal law that is hardly ever enforced. Despite the lack of enforcement, if either Michelle Paterson or Silda Spitzer ever sought a divorce from their husbands, it would probably be granted on the grounds of cruel and inhuman treatment. Cruelty is the most popular ground in New York State today even though there are plenty of marriages breaking up over adultery. Why is this the case?

As one practitioner explained to me recently, no decent divorce lawyer in New York would ever allow their client to admit to a criminal misdemeanor as the grounds for their divorce. Instead, he would prudently advise parties to compromise on the use of the legal fiction of cruelty with this argument about the need to avoid self-incrimination. It is ironic that criminalizing adultery has had the opposite public policy effect: instead of condemning and discouraging certain harmful conduct, it ends up providing the excuse for adulterers to cover their behavior and avoid public stigma.

Posted by Elaine Chiu at 07:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dilemmas of the Cheap Aesthetic

I've frequently taken aim at "expensive tastes" on this blog. It seems like the corollary of that critique would be praise for inexpensive tastes, or a cheap aesthetic. This may well be the cheapest music video ever made (American Princes, Never Grow Old):

Here's the band's (promoter's) description of the video on YouTube:

Take a moment and think back to the younger years. All you have is a pen, notebook paper, and an imagination. No distractions to interrupt you, just you and the music in your head. How would you envision your new favorite rock band? American Princes captures this innocent moment with their music video, Never Grow Old. It will effortlessly and entertainingly take you back to simplicity . . . . It's new, fresh, ingenious, and original.

The simulations here are not merely simple (unlike, say, Justice's graphics-dominated video for DVNO), but are quite a lot less resource-intensive than, say, real drums, guitars, stages, etc. Never Grow Old reminded me of Albert C. Lin's article Virtual Consumption: A Second Life for Earth (2008 BYU L. Rev. 47), which provides a creative response to the Malthusian dilemmas I was discussing yesterday.

Lin cautiously concludes that a shift from real to virtual consumption could relieve pressures on natural resources:

Whether virtual consumption will be better for the environment, or for society at large, remains to be determined. On the one hand, virtual worlds may serve merely as enablers of real consumption. If so, the environmental promise of virtual consumption may be only an illusion. On the other hand, virtual worlds may function as a bridge to a society less dependent on material consumption. Such an outcome would benefit the environment and finally provide a curb to the rising tide of consumption.

But Lin has some fascinating thoughts on whether engagement with a virtual world may lead individuals to care less and less about real ones:

Obviously, Second Life and other virtual worlds differ from Nozick's experience machine (and even more dystopic visions such as that found in The Matrix films) in various ways, not the least of which is that they provide opportunities to interact with other human beings. However, one's ability in Second Life to assume a selected persona and a chosen avatar, combined with the ability to have virtual experiences that simulate real ones, raises serious questions about the moral suitability of these activities.

Viewed in this light, the fact that many Internet users feel as strongly about their online communities as they do about their real communities is both impressive and troubling. Granted, virtual worlds offer far more excitement, with increasingly powerful graphic capabilities, than the video games of yesteryear. The growing attraction of virtual worlds nevertheless may be as much a commentary on the quality of life in the real world as a testament to the experiential value of virtual worlds. As more people establish presences in the virtual world, the danger is that these virtual world users will “tune out” the real world, give it less value, and view its problems as increasingly irrelevant. Technology has had a tendency to foster social isolation by privatizing how we get information, how we do things, and how we entertain ourselves; virtual worlds may well exacerbate that isolation.

Fortunately, the aesthetic valorization of the cheap (or ugly) may not be as dangerous as the romance of the virtual. Liking the cheap (be it real estate, food, or art) can be a training in satisfaction; virtual reality is more bivalent, both compensating for a world that falls short of expectations and subtly making those expectations grander.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 07:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Torture for Tots

Readers of Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Blog might have noticed yesterday abstracts for several new papers from heavy hitters in the legal academy. My favorite of these April 1 abstracts was the Cass Sunstein-Adrian Vermeule paper on “Unrestricted Interrogation of Minors Not Yet Shown to Have Engaged in Culpable Behaviors.” “Given our assumptions, there is a moral obligation for the state to engage in the torture of innocent children.” Download that while it’s hot!

A good April Fool's joke has to be plausible, and I think this abstract fits the bill. The same arguments that have been advanced to argue that executions might be morally required and that torture is at least permissible, if not required, can be used to require torture for tots. All you need is the right hypothetical.

And yet, I think Larry Solum is right that torture for tots is a proposal that most will view as a joke. Indeed, it's a prospect that might help test the claim that we torture when, and if, and only if, necessity demands it. In a seminar discussion a few months ago, I suggested that contemporary support for torture might be driven by a presumption that those who are tortured deserve to be treated thus. Some of those present resisted this characterization, claiming that the arguments were based strictly on necessity, so I offered a hypothetical in which the only way to find the location of the ticking bomb is to torture the terrorist’s innocent young child. As I recall, none of my fellow seminar attendees wanted to defend torture under those circumstances.

A previously unreleased torture memo penned by John Yoo became available yesterday. Marty Lederman links to Part 1 and Part 2 and discusses the memo. David Luban addresses torture for tots, and other weaknesses of ticking bomb arguments, in a new paper available here. And in "Professors Strangelove," available here, I offer some thoughts on torture, national security tough talk, and one of my favorite movies.

UPDATE: My soon-to-be colleague Frank Pasquale points out this Salon piece, which includes a link to a fascinating Youtube clip on the question of torturing children.

Posted by Alice Ristroph at 11:37 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Lipson on The BS That Didn't Bark: Why Didn't (Doesn't) Bear Stearns Go Into Bankruptcy Part II

This post concludes my colleague Jonathan Lipson's set of observations about Bear's bailout. You can find part I, in which Lipson demonstrates some of the advantages of a bankruptcy for Bear, here. Check out also Ribstein's response, here.

Why Didn't Bear Bark?

So, if the standard arguments against a BS bankruptcy don’t stack up, and in fact it might produce a better result than the hastily structured, poorly-executed deal on the table, why no bankruptcy?

The answer may be that while bankruptcy might benefit shareholders, JPM and other stakeholders, it would not benefit the folks who are in fact most likely responsible for the current state of affairs—BS’ officers and directors, and the managers of the hedge funds with whom they were intimately involved.

In any BS bankruptcy, insider transactions with the company of at least the last year—and probably quite a bit longer—would almost certainly be subjected to a searching inquiry. Most likely, a chapter 11 examiner would be appointed to determine what happened at BS, just as Neal Batson did at Enron.

Batson produced a huge report in Enron. Some would say it was not worth the price—allegedly about $100 million. But others would respond that Batson’s investigation did two very important things that created far greater value. First, his report was used in countless litigations that are said to have brought many times that amount back into the bankruptcy estate.

Second, his report revealed at least some of what really happened at Enron. My research on the use of examiners in chapter 11 cases suggests that this “public” value was, at least in the case of Enron, important because it gave lawyers and other professionals guidance on acceptable conduct well beyond that case.

In BS, scrutiny is likely the last thing that senior managers want. The media assumes that management is suffering along with everyone else because people like CEO Cayne had large share holdings, the value of which has been slashed. But this glosses over two important questions.

First, what did BS senior managers—and the management of the hedge funds they supported—get from BS over the last couple of years, whether in stock they sold for far more than $2 (or $10) per share, or cash bonuses, or compensation of some sort from hedge funds within or proximate to BS? These questions become relevant in bankruptcy because these transactions would certainly be scrutinized, and some may be avoided for the benefit of the bankruptcy estate.

BS’s senior managers doubtless understand this. It may be that for them, keeping last year’s goodie basket is worth far more than what they lose in the JPM deal. In a JPM deal—no matter how bad it gets for today’s shareholders—last years’ executive compensation is safe. Bankruptcy may put some or all of that at risk.

Second, and ultimately more important, there is the simple, cleansing effect of public scrutiny. Today, the question that no one asks—the elephant in the room—is where, exactly, all the money went? Of course, not all of it was real money. There was a lot of marking-to-model, which means that some valuations never really involved cash.

But lots of investors bought toxic securities from or through BS or affiliated hedge funds. And they paid cash. So, where did all that money go? Answering that question could go a long way toward understanding what went wrong in the mortgage crisis generally, and perhaps understanding how to prevent similar problems in the future. Today, thanks to JPM and the Federal Reserve, we won’t know.

In some ways, this is really about Sherlock Holmes famous dog that did not bark. There, after all other explanations were eliminated, only one—silence—made sense. Here, it may be that there are plenty of sound reasons to keep BS out of bankruptcy. But so far, it just looks like only one: the insiders want to keep the muzzle on.

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 10:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bear(ish) Blogging

As Larry Ribstein, Gordon Smith, Jeff Lipshaw (below) and others have pointed out, the rise of Bear Stearns' stock price after the announcement of its deal with J.P. Morgan creates some really complex corporate law problems. Today's close, $5.33, is around 2.5 times the offer price (2.30 a share). Whether the Delaware Chancery Court will enforce "Bear's Put" (as Steven Davidoff coined it) seems to me to be underdetermined by caselaw and instead likely will depend on the state of the financial markets. In a less edgy environment, normal rules - like Quickturn - should apply and DE Courts inclined to strike down the clause, even over the Fed’s objection. Indeed, the case would be a good platform to reassert Delaware's dominance! But if current market volatility remains unabated when these issues are decided, I imagine that the no-shop, multiple-vote, clause will be upheld. Thus, J.P. Morgan would be wise to push hard to close the deal sooner, while the market remains turbulent and a potential jurist pliant. (I’m rooting for assignment to V.C. Strine, if we want a wide-ranging opinion to teach in a few years). Useless speculation? Sure!

A distinct part of this evolving story is the buyers of Bear's stock. Some are probably bondholders. Another group, according to today's W$J, are Bear's employees, free (now) to trade and encourage others to buy up the firm. They are reported to believe that several hedge funds, having shorted Bear several weeks and months ago, then broke the bank by withdrawing business from its prime brokerage in the last week or so. Those withdrawals in turn resulted in downgrading Bear's investment rating and putting its ability to trade in jeopardy. (It's the Enron story, but without a Fastow or JEDI, that we know of.) Maybe they think that the SEC will bring some kind of market manipulation case against the shorting funds, which seems like a long-shot. Another possibility could be civil suits seeking disgorgement from the funds, on the theory that they have some kind of fiduciary duty not to provoke a bank run. On what theory such a lawsuit would proceed, I can’t imagine, but I wouldn’t underestimate the creative power of a hungry mob of lawyers. Finally, we’ll almost certainly see a lawsuit against Bear’s directors. I, like Lipshaw, have "some sympathy" for these folks, especially those on the outside, who can't possibly have foreseen the magnitude of the events that overwhelmed the institution.

Third, as many have noted, Bear’s executives aren’t going to walk away with much cash. Their options are under-water, and their guaranteed compensation has been intentionally set at a low level to promote firm performance. Now, some, including Jack Dolmat-Connell, an executive compensation expert, are criticizing this equity-heavy pay schedule for encouraging Bear “to take on too much business risk.” (Again, from today’s W$J). I don’t buy this. Is the idea that if their pay were fixed, they’d have been more risk averse because their upside would have been limited? This seems (to me) to be an unrealistic account how investment bank executives are likely to behave. More than most, such executives are the product of the tournament model, likely to be extremely overconfident and risk-seeking no matter what their compensation structure. (The easy cite here, of course, is Liar's Poker.)

Finally, you've got to wonder what lessons to draw from the last two weeks. In 1966, Henry Manne argued that legalizing insider trading would have several pro-social consequences, among them that it would lead to more accurate prices and thus substitute for public disclosure in circumstances where it might not otherwise occur. There is (admittedly) limited empirical evidence that insider purchases have strong price effects, but insider sales are generally stronger signals. Last Monday, investors valued Bear at between $60 and $70 a share, but there was obviously non-public information that made the price unsustainable. Maybe had insiders been permitted to trade on their knowledge of Bear's financial condition, its decline would have been less precipitous, giving the bank more time to approach the Fed for help before its fire sale became necessary. [Update: Paul Krugman's analogy is a good one. In describing the run on Bear and other like institutions, he says "In other cases, the bank is fundamentally unsound — but the bank run magnifies its losses. It’s as if someone calls “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and there really is a fire — but the stampede kills people who would have survived an orderly evacuation." Exactly - would insider trading have made the run more orderly?] Just a thought, as folks start to think about ways to avert tomorrow’s crisis.

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 08:28 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Passings

Early last week, I attended a memorial service for my colleague, Harold Berman. As others have noted, including here and here, Professor Berman was a preeminent scholar of legal history, comparative law, Soviet and Russian law, jurisprudence, and law and religion. As Guido Calabresi had occasion to say of him: "Berman's work, and especially his Law and Revolution, will endure when almost everything is forgotten. He is the only American who might be paired with Max Weber in the depth of his historical and comparative understanding of the remarkable character of legal modernity - as well as in his appreciation of the inherent fragility and distinctive value of Western legalism."

A member of the Harvard Law School faculty from 1948 to 1985, Professor Berman came to Emory in the face of mandatory retirement, and his desire to continue to teach and write. We were truly lucky to have him. Until near the very end (at the age of 89), he traveled widely, was in the office six days a week, taught a full load of courses, and was an active participant in the life of the community. He was also an incredibly engaged and supportive colleague, including particularly with regard to his most junior colleagues. “This is your law school now,” he once said, speaking of the junior faculty. “If you don’t agree with a decision, we shouldn’t even consider it!”

At the very moving memorial for Professor Berman last week, two things particularly struck me. The first was a colleague’s reference to him as living on in his memory, as “a metaphor” for the values of intellectual curiosity, analytical rigor, and open mind that he hoped he himself would always exhibit as a scholar. We all, I thought, might do well do have such a metaphor in our lives – perhaps both professional and personal – against which to take measure of our choices and commitments, as well as our successes and failures.

Reflecting on the warm recollections and tributes of Professor Berman's family, colleagues, and friends, I somehow also kept recalling the simple notion of “A life well lived.” We should all, I thought, hope to die to such warmth, affection, and appreciation from our families and our co-workers alike. Many might manage one or the other. But to secure such praise from both struck me as quite an achievement.

Later in the week, George Benston, a professor of finance and accounting and member of the Emory University faculty for over twenty years, passed away. Benston was widely cited in the legal literature, for his work on mandatory disclosure and banking regulation, among other subjects, but was highlighted for his contributions far more rarely. By contrast with some of the other scholars who shaped the discipline of law and economics, Benston was a mild, unassuming, and down-to-earth guy. Perhaps for that reason, he may not have received the amount of credit he rightfully deserved.

I will also always remember his joyful description of the fact that he and his wife, Alice, in many decades of marriage, had always made a point to sit down together at the end of the day, to discuss what they had done over the course of the day, their successes, their worries, and the like. Even when separated, he noted, they would strive to do so by phone. Beyond his studies of disclosure and banking, I wonder whether the modern institution of marriage might not do well to learn a thing or two from his example.

Posted by Robert Ahdieh at 06:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

No Politics in Beijing?

It is night in Beijing. Men walk up to a line. Some shake their heads left and right to loosen up. Others roll shoulders and shake arms. They all settle and crouch at the line. The gun sounds. The men race. Just over twenty seconds later two British men have finished second and third. Later when they receive their medals, they raise their hands as a political statement. Wait, that won’t happen.

Remember Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and the Mexico City Olympics? O.K. neither do I. I was not born yet. Still the image and the impact of the event stuck around long enough that I knew about it growing up. And the image of their stance on the medal podium is still powerful.

According to the Daily Mail “British Olympic chiefs are to force athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China's appalling human rights record – or face being banned from travelling to Beijing.” The Mail also reports that a British football team was ordered to give the Nazi salute in 1938. Last as of the Mail’s article of February 10 the British Olympic Association stated that “any athlete who refuses to sign the agreements will not be allowed to travel to Beijing.” The BOA seems to have backed off the position and claims it will not gag the athletes.

So maybe the British and Australians (who also are asking their athletes to make no political comments) just want to get along with everyone and Canada, the United States, the Netherlands and Belgium are willing to allow speech. But, before folks in the U.S. and elsewhere jump in and proclaim superiority, remember that at least in the United States, much of the country shunned Messrs. Smith and Carlos after their moment of speech.

The Olympics seek to be non-political. And perhaps athletes should not use the venue for their political speech. Then again so little today is viewed as unconnected and anyone in the spotlight seems to be a voice for something maybe that apolitical ideal is not so real. The film Chariots of Fire has a key moment when Eric Liddle (born in China by the way) one of the runners refuses to run on the Sabbath. The position caused an uproar in the film although he apparently knew of the problem and trained for the 400m earlier. In other words, when one has a moment, a moment when the world is watching, and believes in something would a piece of paper stop one from saying what must be said? Who knows? Maybe that same sense of duty would make the words stick in one’s throat. Maybe the best way to show up the host county is to demonstrate excellence and win. But excellence takes many forms. One could win and still wish to make an excellent, decent, maybe even respectful comment that shows the world something is wrong but without vitriol. A raised fist may do just that.

Whatever mode of expression is best, demanding that someone sign a piece of paper to give up one’s speech runs contrary to the excellence the Olympics seeks to foster and ask of athletes and perhaps by extension of us all.

Posted by Deven Desai at 01:47 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Et tu, Huckabee?

Preliminary responses to Mitt Romney's withdrawal from the race for the Republican nomination seem to concur on a view of the news as a big plus for John McCain, the presumptive nominee of the party. I wonder whether that's right, though.

At one level, I understand the logic. McCain was already fairly likely to win the nomination. With his major competitor out of the picture (along with his deep pockets), the odds of a McCain victory would seem that much higher. (I haven't checked, but presumably the prediction markets reflect as much.)

With Romney's departure, however, Mike Huckabee will no longer be splitting the votes of the conservative, rather virulently anti-McCain bloc of the party. Instead, he gets all of that vote. (Query, of course, whether that's right. It might not be, if those voters are oriented more to electability than to their distaste for McCain. On the other hand, if they see McCain as a done deal anyway, why not actually vote your preferences?)

Some might shrug their shoulders: "So what if Huckabee gets all those votes?" Remember, though, that Huckabee has already won six states, even with another conservative in the race. Head-to-head against McCain and his fairly high negatives among a significant portion of Republican primary participants, who knows how he might do.

Am I suggesting that Huckabee could win the nomination? Not really. That still seems fairly unlikely, even given the winner-take-all nature of many of the Republican primaries. Rather, the question is whether McCain will need to continue to tack fairly hard to the right, in the face of an articulate, witty, populist, Southern governor. If he does, it can't possibly help, when it comes time to face Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

At that point, he might well come to wish that Romney had stuck it out.

Posted by Robert Ahdieh at 02:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

SWF's

No, no. As much as my subject might look like titillating Instant Messaging (IM) short-hand used by the High School Musical set, it's actually Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF's) that I have in mind.

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal (requires subscription), Alan Murray reported from the World Economic Forum, on Sovereign Wealth Funds as the "it girl" at Davos this year. (Thereby displacing private equity from that role and, in the words of a private equity fund manager in attendance, "return[ing] [them] to the obscurity that [they] so richly deserve.") As Abdul-Aziz Abdullah Al Ghurair, chief executive of one of Dubai's SWF's, dryly noted: "I'm surprised they are paying so much attention to us." Paris Hilton, eat your heart out; Abdul-Aziz has arrived at the party.

Much has been made of Sovereign Wealth Funds' substantial investments in major U.S. companies, including in numerous banks struggling amidst the subprime mortgage crisis. No less an analyst (and internationalist) than former U.S. Treasury Secretary and President of Harvard University Larry Summers is among those sounding alarms.

Two things particularly struck me about Murray's report from Davos, though. The first was the fact that the second largest SWF, following the very prominent fund controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi, is the Government Pension Fund of Norway. Somehow, I couldn't help but wonder whether the heat surrounding the rise of SWF's would be quite as great, if the story line wasn't about Arabs and the Chinese buying stakes in brand-name U.S. companies and banks, but Norway doing so.

The second was Murray's point about the relative place of the United States in the global economy. Murray reports data from the McKinsey Global Institute, finding that $56.1 trillion (or one-third) of the world's financial assets were held in the U.S. in 2006, but that emerging markets had experienced explosive growth, such that they had come to hold $23.6 trillion (by 2006). Looking at McKinsey's own summary of the report, one finds more of the same. European financial markets had risen to a level just shy of the United States, at $53.2 trillion, but also have a higher growth rate. In part on account of the latter, the euro is "emerging as a rival to the dollar as the world's global reserve currency." The growth rate for the emerging markets, as suggested, also beat the U.S. rate.

Perhaps we really are reaching - eight years into the new century - the end of "The American Century." Many have suggested a loss of U.S. global prestige and diplomatic influence in recent years. But perhaps the years ahead promise a similar decline in economic influence. Where once U.S. public and private entities bailed out distressed governments overseas, the last year has seen the rescue of struggling U.S. banks and other companies by government instrumentalities of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and other sovereign states.

As Murray points out in his piece, this redistribution of wealth (and influence) is clearly good news for many in the world. And it is at least not obvious that it is overly harmful to Americans themselves. As far a rhetoric and self-perception go, however, we may be in for an interesting ride.

Posted by Robert Ahdieh at 07:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Where Were You When?

The Times, reporting on the tragic death of Heath Ledger, interviews a law student on the street:

Others in the crowd said their first reaction to word of his death was disbelief. [X], 24, a law student at New York University, was in a seminar about Jesus when someone sent her a message about Mr. Ledger. She checked the Web, then walked to the apartment “because of the way our generation is; we sort of feel we’re a part of each other’s lives.”

X,* I agree. And, as an interested observer of the lives of others, including law professors, I wonder how Prof. J. H. H. Weiler will feel about this random mention of web surfing during his class in the nation's paper of record.**

* If you want to see the student's name, check out the article. But it doesn't add much to the story to repeat it here.
** At least I think this is the right class. It is the only class in the NYU directory with Jesus in the title, which seems pretty conclusive. It is also a seminar, taught Tuesdays this semester from 4-5:50.

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 11:25 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Clap for Tinkerbell . . .

. . . and then read Larry Kudlow look for a silver lining in a bear market:

The world is not coming to an end. Our free-market capitalist system goes through periodic corrections and cleansings. It’s the natural order of things. Things are going to be okay.

(Yes, I know I mixed three different metaphors in this post. I challenge readers to pile onto this haystack in the comments.)

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 12:41 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

The Future of Sensory Jurisprudence

[This post continues the debate about Whose Eyes are You Going To Believe, the draft paper Dan Kahan, Don Braman and I have recently begun to circulate. For previous installments, see posts on Balkin, CoOp, Volokh (Kerr), and CoOp (our reply).]

As I hope we've made clear, our ultimate claim is not (cf. Kerr) that "Justice Scalia was privileging a conservative white male view" of Scott, but that judges need to be generally mindful of the possibility that their views of facts, and factual dissensus, are as culturally contingent as the public more generally. Thus, we argue for rhetorical humbleness, and for deciding cases on grounds other than a holding that no reasonable juror could see the facts in a certain way. It's a modest response to the large problem of cognitive illiberalism in legal decision making.

In this post, I'm going to make a bigger claim, one which isn't so much based on the paper or my co-authors' views, but is instead just the kind of irresponsible extension of the data that blogging encourages. In short: it's my view that Scott is a harbinger of a whole mess of cases on the near horizon: a sensory jurisprudence enabled by a total surveillance society.

Total surveillance as a concept is one well-explored by other authors on this blog. But even in Dan Solove's well-known post – and subsequent highly downloaded article – about the "I've nothing to hide" problem, the doctrinal consequences of total surveillance were virtually ignored. And by doctrinal, I do not mean the privacy law consequences: I mean the likelihood that as surveillance becomes omnipresent in most public and some private places, judges will use surveillance evidence ["SE"] in an increasing number of cases to resolve factual disputes.

This use of SE would seem to promise more accurate, efficient, and ex-post legitimate litigation outcomes. The theory would go that most litigation is driven by a dispute about the facts: SE should dispositively resolve such disputes, promoting settlement and (at worst) streamlining trials. Best of all, opinions enlisting SE would be more likely to be persuasive. Thus, if Judge Cardozo, ruling on the relative fault of the parties in, say Palsgraf, could have just embedded a video of the events instead of describing it in his beautiful but inscrutable prose, perhaps readers/viewers would have more likely to agree with him. Or in a sexual harassment case, if the workplace was totally taped, evidence of a hostile work environment would be both clearer and harder to refute. And in the case of coerced interrogations, a judge could simply embed a video, instead of describing it, and say: "look, it's obvious!"

The connection between SE and surveillance is (ironically) made stark in a video ... but to see it, you'll need to read past the jump.

But this view of SE and the jurisprudence it will produce is too rosy. As we illustrate in our paper, the "facts" a reasonable jury would find after watching the Scott tape are culturally dependent (and also influenced by demographics, wealth, etc.). In a future where more legal cases are resolved based on SE, the danger is that law will ignore this prism effect, and simply embed the evidence as if it resolved the question of "what happened."

This isn't to say, of course, that surveillance evidence is a bad thing in and of itself. It can improve accuracy, reduce frivolous litigation, and deter wrongdoing (think about the various aspects of the CIA taping controversy). But, as I suggested in my first post on Scott, the idea that surveillance evidence will distill litigation into a simple search for truth is fundamentally misguided:

[C]ourts’ ordinary role to [is] determine legal facts, instead of the truth of the "event." We don't read opinions to tell us what happened. We read them to tell us what facts the courts have found. That is why innocence is not, ultimately, a legal defense: the facts found by a jury control. This separation is a necessary part of the dispute resolution system, enabling finality. [Scott] has the potential to destabilize this delicate regime in areas that would likely matter to some folks more than the civil rights suit of one speeder.

Not convinced? Read the paper (again?). It speaks for itself.

(Folks interested in this topic might also like Jessica Silbey's Judges as Film Critics: New Approaches to Filmic Evidence)

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 01:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Network News Gives Up

With the Daily Show's writers on strike, you might think it difficult to get entertaining parodies of the poor state of network newscasts -- where "in-depth reports" mean the story is 2 whole minutes long -- but that's not necessarily true. The weekend evening newscasts are becoming a pretty good parody of themselves.

Take this example from last night's ABC World News Sunday, reporting on disabled sprinter Oscar Pistorius's efforts to be allowed to compete in the 2008 Olympics. One key question is whether Pistorius's artificial legs give him an "unfair" advantage over able-bodied runners -- "unfair" defined plausibly as due to the use of technology during the race. Certainly Pistorius is using technology, but does that actually give him any advantage? When the New York Times looked at that issue 8 months ago, it actually did a step-by-step analysis of how Pistorius's artificial lower legs compare to having muscles and feet, concluding that Pistorius has to work harder to achieve the same speed in the same amount of time:

Here's how ABC News does it.

First, "some fear" that sprinters like Pistorius are catching up to able-bodied sprinters, and might "pass them." (Check out this video at about the 1:15 mark.) How do we know that might happen? Because this PowerPoint graphic shows Pistorius moving ahead of another runner:

Second, allowing Pistorius to compete might mean that eventually we have to allow Steve Austin -- the Bionic Man -- to compete too. I kid you not:

Did ABC hire Kent Brockman while I wasn't looking?

Posted by Bruce Boyden at 04:39 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Can Actors Do Everything? Mediate, Litigate?

George Clooney, Tom Hanks and other actors have offered to step in and "mediate" the writer's strike. They say they will just tell the two sides "you have to live with this (particular terms) and get over it." Some bloggers suggest only "starpower" will make the producers bargain in good faith.

I hope these well intended actors know what they are doing when they offer to mediate. It sounds like they don’t. Mediators don’t tell the parties what to do (”you need to live with that and get over it”). They facilitate negotiations between the parties so they can (together) come to an agreement and “live with it.” It is interesting that actors think they can “act” anything–including being professionals in a field that is complex and requires judgment and knowledge of how and when to “intervene.” George Clooney “acted” a great doc on ER but I wouldn’t want him doing my actual emergency treatment. And he was a law firm "fixer" in Michael Clayton but would you really want him to negotiate a legal settlement or litigate an unfair labor practice charge? Mediation can be just as hard as “human surgery” and more difficult than a trial. Not necessarily a good idea to have non-professionals (even those with clout) in this situation. As we say as professional mediators, first “do no harm.” (And that means entering into things/performances we know nothing about.)

Using arguments about "starpower" is not unlike "muscle mediation" (what we (the United States) do in North Korea and the mid-east --use our power to try to dictate terms (and peace). One can see how stable those "agreements" are. If they want to mediate, perhaps next we'll have law professors (and mediators) acting!!

Posted by Carrie Menkel-Meadow at 11:17 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

If It Bleeds, It Leads

In an interesting twist on the old adage of broadcast journalism, "if it bleeds, it leads," CNN.com has quietly modified the news categories on its home page, to replace "Law" with "Crime". When you follow the "Crime" link, you find somewhat greater diversity of coverage, now under the heading of "Crime and Justice".

Perhaps tellingly, though, consider the two teaser headlines on the home page, as I'm typing this post:

"Blood near Marine's likely grave, sheriff reports"

"O.J. Simpson headed to Las Vegas jail cell"

"Crime" is clearly a lot easier a sell than "Law". What might that forebode, though, for the general public's notions of law? What long-term consequences can we expect of a consumer-driven orientation of the mass media to covering "crime" versus "law"? Perhaps few. Perhaps CNN.com is simply a place to go for entertainment and titillation anyway. In that case, it doesn't much matter whether the coverage is of blood spatter or of the Supreme Court. But if this is supposed to be "the news" - somehow, the idea of "All the News That's Fit to Print" comes to mind - I have to wonder.

Posted by Robert Ahdieh at 08:10 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

How Should Courts Handle Cultural Dissensus on Summary Judgment?

That's the deep question unanswered by last year's Supreme Court decision, Scott v. Harris. As Dan Kahan announced here on Balkin, he, current guest-blogger Don Braman, and I have written a paper testing the majority's view that no reasonable jury could or would find for the plaintiff after watching this videotape. The experiment we conducted was simple and intuitive: we showed the video to a 1,350 member subject pool and asked them about it. Our first circulating draft, Whose Eyes are You Going to Believe? An Empirical (and Normative) Assessment of Scott v. Harris, can be downloaded here.

Overall, we found substantial support for the Court's position: most members of the subject pool agreed with the majority about the risks posed by the police chase, the relative fault of the parties, and the ultimate questions of justification. But does majority support mean SJ is correct? Our thought was that that question can't be meaningfully answered without some understanding of the characteristics of the minority of people who would disagree with the court. We wanted to identify who those people were and figure out whether there was any explanation that might explain their differing view of the tape besides that they are unreasonable. In particular, we wanted to test the hypothesis, grounded in cultural cognition theory, that the dissenters would not be random statistical outliers but persons disposed by shared cultural values and other characteristics to process visual information in the tape different from how the majority did.

Our results showed exactly that. Dissenters to the Court's view of the facts and the appropriateness of summary judgment were linked by shared cultural styles that features a commitment to egalitarianism and communitarianism. By the same token, subjects who were strongly inclined to see things the Court’s way were linked by commitments to hierarchy and individualism.

Drawing on Joseph Gusfield's work on “status collectivities," we imagined four potential members of the venire: Pat, Ron, Linda, and Bernie. You can see their pictures to the left. Ron is a rich Goldwater republican from Arizona. Bernie is a socialist professor from Vermont with average income. Linda a social worker from Philadelphia, whose income is also at the mean. And Pat is the average American in every respect.

Using statistical simulations, we found that these individuals would have very different reactions to the video, based on their distinct forms of culturally motivated cognition of the risks involved. Take, for example, subjects' reaction to the statement “[t]he danger that Harris’s driving posed to the police and the public justified Officer Scott’s decision to end the chase in a way that put Harris’s own life in danger." The graphic below illustrates how Ron, Linda, Bernie and Pat will respond.

At least three-fifths (64%, +/- 4%) of the persons who share Linda’s characteristics “disagree”—about one-half either strongly or moderately—with the statement and thus the result in Scott. Those who hold Bernie’s characteristics see things in nearly exactly the same way as those holding Linda’s. Pat does agree with the Scott majority, although not without a bit of equivocation. There is a 60% (+/- 3%) chance that a person drawn randomly from the population would either moderately or strongly agree that the police were justified in using deadly force. There is, however, a 16% (+/- 3%) chance that he/she would be only “slightly” inclined to agree, and over a 20% chance that he/she would conclude upon watching the tape that use of deadly force was unreasonable. Finally, over 80% of the individuals who share Ron's characteristics would find that the police acted reasonably.

What does dissensus of this character mean for how courts should resolve summary judgment motions in cases like, and unlike Scott? When minorities of the venire would process visual information in particular way, but that minority sees things the way they do because they are linked by values?

I'll explore these questions in subsequent posts (as will, I think, Don.)

Previous Posts:

Hoffman, The Death of Fact-finding and the Birth of Truth

Crocker, Do Texts Speak for Themselves?

Kerr, What Are the Facts in Scott v. Harris?

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 03:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

I'm Sorry... Sincerely, The IRS

Today, the New York Times reports, the National Taxpayer Advocate delivered her annual report to Congress. First established in 1998, the Taxpayer Advocate Service describes itself as "an independent organization within the IRS that assists taxpayers who are experiencing economic harm, who are seeking help in resolving tax problems that have not been resolved through normal channels, or who believe that an IRS system or procedure is not working as it should." Judging by the generous use of exclamation points on its home page, moreover, the Service would appear to be quite excited about this mission.

Among other things, I was struck by certain aspects of the IRS' present-day operations that the annual report critiques. I hadn't realized, for example, that the IRS makes widespread - if ineffectual - use of private debt collectors, or that it charges (sometimes substantial) fees to respond to taxpayer inquiries.

Two reform proposals in the annual report, however, particularly caught my eye:

First, there is the Advocate's proposal to adopt a new taxpayer bill of rights - an odd-seeming concept, to begin with. (Isn't the Administrative Procedure Act the "bill of rights" of the modern administrative state?) This bill of rights, moreover, would include a list of taxpayer "responsibilites," including requirements that they (in the Times' words) "conduct themselves honestly and [] cooperate with auditors and tax collectors." But what exactly is the "honest conduct" the Advocate has in mind? Avoiding fraudulent statements to the IRS? Surely, we've already got that covered. What's other honest conduct might be expected? Some general promise of good and clean living?

Even more eye-catching were the report's proposed "Apology Payments," to be doled out by the Advocate's office - in amounts ranging from $100 to $1,000, and up to a collective cap of $1 million - to taxpayers who suffer "excessive expense or undue burden" because of IRS error or delay. Leaving aside the procedural complexities of such a scheme, are there analogous arrangements to be found in other areas of law? (The Times reports that the U.K. and Australia already have such a scheme in their tax code.) Do we do it anywhere else?

Posted by Robert Ahdieh at 08:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

AALS: A Modest Dissent

Many thanks to Dan for the welcome, and to all the Concurring Opinion permabloggers for inviting me to visit. As a long-time reader, I'm glad to make my first - and hopefully not last - foray into the blogosphere here.

In posts preceding the recently concluded Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting, Brian Leiter and Orin Kerr respectively questioned the intellectual content, and suggested the underwhelming quality, of AALS conference programming - or at least that part of the "programming" that occurs in the hotel's ballrooms, as opposed to its lobby and various hallways, and at an array of nearby restaurants and bars. This critique is hardly unique to them, moreover. Rather, it seems to constitute the conventional wisdom.

Having spent almost three days last week not simply "at AALS" in the abstract, but actually at the conference site (I'm close enough to the City not to have devoted time to shopping and sightseeing), I thought I would devote my first post to offering a modest dissent from the Leiter, Kerr, et al. critique.

Of course, there is the standard defense of the AALS annual meeting as an occasion for systematic schmoozing - a species of speed dating for law professors. (On this count, I might note that this year's venue - the Hilton New York - had some real strengths. One could basically set oneself on an infinite loop up and down the escalators at either end of the second and third floor (see the 3-D tour) - where most of the schmoozing took place - for the entire weekend.) But a defense of schmoozing would be too easy: What's not to like about it? Instead, I want to suggest that AALS may have merit of the intellectual variety, notwithstanding Brian and Orin's critique.

In essence, this possibility turns on the distinct nature of the intellectual payoff that one might get from AALS, versus the specialist meetings of scholars (e.g., the American Law & Economics Association (ALEA); Law & Society) that Brian highlights as alternative, more intellectually stimultating venues for legal academics to meet. I emphatically agree that the latter offer far better occasions to engage with cutting-edge scholarship - and, in light of the critique of AALS as a schmooze-fest, with cutting-edge scholars - in one's field. I have long described ALEA as one of my favorite conferences, given a combination of its content and format, and also enjoy the annual meetings of the American Society of International Law and the American Society of Comparative Law.

Perhaps the AALS offers intellectual benefits of a different variety, however. Thinking about the Leiter, Kerr, et al. critique of the AALS annual meeting as I reviewed the weekend's schedule, I was struck by my ability to identify a substantial number of sessions I was interested to attend, and individual panelists I was interested to hear.

Reviewing my various markings and notations, further, I realized that the panels highlighted often fell well beyond my research interests in the substantive areas of corporate and securities law, contracts, and international trade, and in institutional implications of administrative law, regulation theory, and federalism. Among other sessions, I'd marked panels on judicial independence, empirical research, access to justice, disability rights, the Supreme Court's approach to religious doctrine, the future of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the Fourteenth Amendment. (Apologies to the many other ones I also found interesting, but have left off this list...)

Perhaps, it occured to me, I was doing something different at AALS than I do at ALEA, ASIL, and other more focused scholarly gatherings. Perhaps I was feeding a different intellectual need. Perhaps, more specifically, the AALS annual meeting was an occasion to explore areas of general interest, lying beyond my areas of scholarly emphasis.

The AALS annual meeting, in this perspective, might be seen as a way to preserve some part of our generalist capacities as legal academics. Even as specialization - quite appropriately, in many respects - increasingly becomes the norm among legal academics, it might be that AALS offers us an opportunity to get a taste of other areas of research and study, be they one degree or many removed from our particular areas of research.

If so, it might help to justify the relatively more limited intellectual stimulation we get from AALS panels in our own field. As I heard it said repeatedly over the weekend - to one well-versed in the relevant subject, the content of most panels felt like a reporting of recent, yet familiar, research; like a review of old ground, etc., etc. To the relative outsider, however, the same panel may have offered a useful window of insight, into issues under discussion in the field.

To be clear, I do not mean to posit the foregoing as the intention of the AALS annual meeting organizers, or even as descriptive of the patterns of panel attendance, among the vast majority of AALS attendees. It might, however, constitute some defense of the AALS annual meeting - or at least something like the AALS annual meeting - as an intellectual venue for legal academics.

Posted by Robert Ahdieh at 11:05 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Check Availability for 2008

Happy New Year! The New York Times is off to a good start, featuring Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein explaining on New Year's Day how most of what we will react to in the coming year will be the effect of an availability cascade, sort of the availability heuristic on steroids. The availability heuristic, identified by Tversky and Kahnemann, is the cognitive phenomenon by which people base their estimate of the frequency or likelihood of an event occurring by how easily it is brought to mind.

The focus was on global warming alarms, and in that arena, according to the article, the brokers of the cascade will be the "what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels." The point is that even if greenhouse gases are warming the earth, and even if it that warming is dangerous (concede both for the sake of what follows), most of what gets cited as an effect of global warming is not evidence of global warming. For example, while some ice in the poles is melting, at other spots, it is at record thickness. Again, this is not to minimize global warming; it is to take stock of what is and what is not evidence of a trend.

My particular peeve in the availability cascade is the corporate governance "crisis." I will be doing my best to assess whether I'm matching the correct evidence to the correct conclusion, and I wish the same to everybody else for the New Year. In the meantime, I'm stocking the cellar with canned food and bottled water in honor of the 100th anniversary (on June 30) of the Tunguska event.

See you at AALS.

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw at 09:16 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

What's Wrong With A Company Paying for a CEO's Family to Fly?