Revisiting the Contracts Scholarship of Stewart Macaulay: The Second Week's Contributors

We continue our online symposium inspired by Revisiting the Contracts Scholarship of Stewart Macaulay: On the Empirical and the Lyrical (Jean Braucher, John Kidwell, and William C. Whitford, eds., Hart Publishing 2013) with two posts this week. All of this made possible through the organizational genius of Jean Braucher, who recruited the participants in this symposium.  So we at the blog are all very grateful to her.

Gillian K. Hadfield is the Richard L. and Antoinette Schamoi Kirtland professor of law and professor of economics at the University of Southern California. She studies the design of legal and dispute resolution systems; contracting; and the performance and regulation of legal markets and the legal profession. 

Her recent publications include “What is Law:  A Coordination Model of the Characteristics of Legal Order” (with Barry Weingast, Journal of Legal Analysis 2012); "The Dynamic Quality of Law: Judicial Incentives, Legal Human Capital and the Adaptation of Law (Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 2011); "Legal Infrastructure for the New Economy” (I/S:  Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 2012) and "Higher Demand, Lower Supply? A Comparative Assessment of the Legal Resource Landscape for Ordinary Americans" (Fordham Urban Law Journal 2010).

Professor Hadfield holds a B.A.H. from Queen’s University, a J.D. from Stanford Law School and Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. She served as clerk to Chief Judge Patricia Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit. She has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Columbia and NYU law schools, a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is a member of the American Law Institute, director of the American Law and Economics Association and the International Society for New Institutional Economics and past president of the Canadian Law and Economics Association.  She serves on advisory boards for the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law, LegalZoom, Pearl.com, and Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers, and on the Editorial Committee of the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.  

More of Professor Hadfield's publications can be found here.

 Jonathan Lipson is the Harold E. Kohn Professor of Law at Temple University's Beasley School of Law.  Professor Lipson teaches commercial, corporate and bankruptcy law courses, including a deal-based simulation. From 2010-2012, he was the Foley & Lardner Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

His research focuses on business failure systems, with a particular emphasis on the role that information forcing rules play in influencing outcomes. He has written a number of articles about the informational aspects of the U.S. secured credit system, the bankruptcy system, and the role that lawyers play in designing and implementing transactions under the risk of financial failure. He is an occasional empiricist, having authored the first qualitative empirical study of lawyers’ practice of writing third-party closing opinions (which was selected for presentation at the 2005 Yale/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum). He has also developed a unique data set on the use of examiners in large Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases. 

He has a side expertise on constitutional issues in bankruptcy. He has authored papers on, among other things, the Catholic diocese bankruptcies, sovereign immunity defenses in bankruptcy, and the larger structural questions presented by the Bankruptcy Clause of the United States Constitution.

Before beginning a teaching career, Professor Lipson practiced corporate, commercial and bankruptcy law in Boston, with the firm of Hill & Barlow (1995 – 1999), and in New York with Kirkland & Ellis (1992 – 1995) and Milbank Tweed (1990-1992). 

He holds several leadership positions in the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association, where he is a Section Content Officer.  Previously, he was Chair of the Publications Board, and Chair of the Committee on Business Law Education. He was the Chair of the Section on Commercial and Related Consumer Law of the Association of American Law Schools (2002-2003). He was elected in 2005 to the American Law Institute.   Professor Lipson speaks and blogs frequently on business law subjects, including corporate reorganization and business law education. He also served as an expert witness in certain complex reorganizations including, most prominently, Enron’s bankruptcy.

His work has appeared in, among others, the UCLA Law Review, the Boston University Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, the Business Lawyer, the University of Southern California Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, the Minnesota Law Review and the Wisconsin Law Review . 

More of Professor Lipson's publications can be found here.

Below are links to last week's posts:

An introduction to the symposium

Biographical information about last week's contributors

Jay Feinman, Ambitition and Humility in Contract Law

Alan Hyde, Stewart Macaulay, System Builder

Kate O'Neill, The Mess We're In

Deborah Post, One Contracts Professor's Preference for State Court Decisions

We look forward to another lively week of contributions.

[JT]