not sure if everyone can access this, but I just learned about some dramatic changes to SSRN from Steve Bainbridge's Substack. This is really bad; SSRN has been how I keep up with scholarship in my field from a variety of researchers www.stephenbainbridge.com/p/the-social...

NEW: Xinjiang has the highest detention capacity in the world, according to FT analysis - enough space for almost 1 in 40 people in the region - more than five years after the Chinese govt announced the camps had closed.

15 years of entry level law prof hiring:

Conflicting Values in Judicial Valuations is now forthcoming at the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies! Thanks to the reviewers, discussants, and conference participants who have helped the paper.

AI has genuinely useful applications in law but 1) you need a large knowledge base to use it effectively and 2) law schools need to focus on providing that knowledge base. My worry is future lawyers will trust automated judgments over their own.

Bank Manlius, IL

I’m not sure why this isn’t being mentioned more, but: IRS policy for 50 years has been that the sitting president & VP get audited every year, in an effort to reassure the public they’re not corruptly abusing the office to enrich themselves.

We’re live! Huge thanks to the editors. repository.uclawsf.edu/hastings_bus...

I will get access to my faculty office this summer and am now deciding how I should decorate it! Would love to hear from faculty about how they have used the physical design of their offices to make their lives easier/aura farm

Breaking news: Indiana University plant microbiologist Roger Innes has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders. The move comes after Innes complained about the government’s prosecution of Chinese postdocs. https://scim.ag/4tsDqRr

🚨 Sens. Murray & Wyden release text of landmark "Fair Trusts Act for Fiscal Responsibility" featuring annual 1-3% tax on net worth of tax-avoiding trusts. One-page summary: www.murray.senate.gov/wp-content/u... For more in-depth coverage of this approach see this thread: bsky.app/profile/bdge...

Not going to hold my breath waiting for a retraction from every publication that treated this study as proof that YIMBYism doesn't work.

In 2008 we absolutely saw runs on shadow banks, but we also saw runs on actual banks! They just didn't come from depositors: www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

A sleeper pick for a critical election to watch: California Insurance Commissioner. Given the fragility of insurers' relationship to the state, a failed insurance commissioner could be a devastating blow. The Dem primary is June 2. A quick rundown of some of the candidates:

cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment

Once more: the Supreme Court, strong-form law & economics, and Marxist legal theory agree that the most important function of the Court is to protect capital. What they disagree about is whether that is normatively good.

Nice piece on the specifics of the tax rules that incentivized Warner Bros to shelve Coyote vs Acme, Batgirl, and Scoob!: Warner Bros was likely accelerating a IRC 165 loss to the present year. This maneuver relies on principles unacceptable in other areas of tax law. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Senator Wyden has officially released his Protecting Proper Life Insurance From Abuse Act, which strips the tax benefits from private placement life policies if the underlying segregated insurer asset account supports less than 25 individual policies. www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-memb...

Examining the Cybersyn Project in Chile. A network that in 1972 connected, through telex machines, more than 300 recently nationalized firms, from Sebastian Edwards www.nber.org/papers/w35002

Very proud and happy to see that this is up and that Texas Law students can take my seminar on Unorthodox Business Associations this fall. Always looking for more examples!

An observation re-inspired by seeing this new paper: in the agentic AI era, the true foe of empirical legal studies is the judiciary. Empirical studies with regulatory data can pull in millions of observations in weeks, days (hours?). But if you do work on litigation, good luck.

Does anyone know why SSRN has abruptly destroyed itself and made articles impossible to find through google search?

Austin’s surge of new housing supply drove down housing prices across the board, with the largest benefit going to renters in the lowest cost buildings: “Rents declined about 11% in older non-luxury buildings that cater to lower-income renters, known as Class C buildings.”

In economics, a new generation (people like Simon Oh, Ishita Sen, Ana-Maria Tenekedijieva, Pari Sastry) has begun a revival of interest in property & casualty insurance markets. Life insurance and health insurance are separate animals entirely. We’re watching the tip of an iceberg.

Dolores Huerta's statement on Cesar Chavez: “I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for... I can no longer stay silent and must share my own experiences"

Among other things, this paper is a showcase of how tools entirely internal to economics can demonstrate findings that are entirely contrary to oversimplistic "econ 101" narratives. pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/...

Tax Notes has discovered that Jeffrey Epstein created several Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts after he was indicted in 2006. My read: the premiums contributed suggest that Epstein was probably not using them for the income tax exemption, but quite possibly for asset protection.

Having a chuckle that this article has the high ratio of downloads to abstract views of any article I've ever seen. What the people want! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below

When I worked at the Chicago Fed, we became interested in a unique quirk of insurance accounting: states can issue insurers "permitted practice" accounting exceptions. They're relatively uncommon but acan occasionally be quite significant. Our writeup is out: link.springer.com/epdf/10.1057...

Hey that’s about the cost of the SSI Restoration Act, which would cut recipient poverty by 60%, eliminate marriage penalties, and modernize draconian asset limits.

As part of preparing to teach my first seminar, I've been going through literature on business entities whose governance logics are structurally different than Fortune 500-style Berle & Means corporations (funds, consumer co-ops, etc.), and then I found this: repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol116/i...

There's one non-public-utility market in America where it is routine for legislators, including in deep-red states, to endorse price controls, and no one has a problem with it! www.wsj.com/finance/regu...

Meanwhile, affordable housing costs per unit in Boston are creeping toward the million-dollar mark...

Under the new FAFSA form, when applying for financial aid you only have to report a 529 account *for that student*, meaning that if you have n children, you only have to report 1/n of your total 529 assets. Pure arbitrage through faulty reporting rules. thecollegefinanciallady.com/2026/01/13/t...

I love reading securities litigation expert reports because sometimes they're 800 pages long with 650 pages being appendices of asset return time series and earnings call transcripts, and sometimes they're just someone writing a 10 pager and then attaching their CV

I'm proud to announce that I have defended my finance dissertation and that this summer I will become an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Texas at Austin! Most of all, I would like to thank Roberta Romano, whose JD-PhD program in finance changed my career.

Disgraced former Apollo CEO Leon Black reportedly consulted with Jeffrey Epstein on use of GRATs to dodge estate & gift tax. I searched the Epstein files and found a doc that appears to show that in 2015, Black held over 70% of his family office (value in the billions) in GRATs.

BREAKING: The Tribune confirmed on Instagram that the man shot has died, according to two sources with knowledge of the incident. ICE attempted to order local police from the scene, but Chief Brian O'Hara refused, sources also told the Tribune. O'Hara instructed his officers to preserve the scene.

Recommended, especially for the insightful point about private equity as a solution to "partner runs."

A couple years ago, for my professional responsibility class I wrote up a paper on what happened to the lawyers at Dewey & LeBoeuf and the implications for partnership governance in the legal industry. It'll be formally published in the UC Law Business Journal! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KckG... www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...

Liked this paper, "Judge Ideology and Corporate Tax Planning," a lot. When the federal Circuit Court of a firm's headquarters becomes more liberal, firms reduce the aggressiveness of their tax planning (proxied by effective tax rate and certain higher-risk maneuvers). papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Year 1 data on congestion pricing in Manhattan… * Vehicle traffic: -11% * Foot traffic: +3.4% * Storefront vacancy: -0.9% * Pollution: -22% * Revenue for mass transit: $548M So YES this has been a huge success.

I learned a lot from this paper, Valuing Litigation Assets by Robert Weber. Burford Capital, the largest publicly traded litigation finance company, was reporting the fair value of their litigation claims on their quarterly reports using expected value methods that didn't use time value of money!

The American Economic Association's Committee on the Job Market surveyed Economics Departments in the U.S. regarding their plans to hire assistant professors this cycle (2025-26). 29.7% said that their department was under a hiring freeze. 1/3 #EconSky #EconJobMarket

You think this is a niche story, but turns out something like 1/3 of the wealth of the top .1% richest Americans -- prob more than $5 trillion -- is in trusts that will never pay a penny of inheritance tax. Let's fix that, eh? Source: SSRN eLibrary share.google/AC0TBnGCCASz...

The Second Circuit has ruled for the Commissioner in this case, on the grounds that Pascucci does not have a sufficient "property interest" in the fund in which the life insurance policy made an investment. Life insurance doctrine holds. www.taxnotes.com/research/fed...

Wrote a new paper on the econometrics of financial event studies, would value feedback! It's very new. With my amazing grad student Tianshu Lyu www.tianshulyu.com, who is on the market. You should hire him! paulgp.com/papers/finan...

Before Switzerland’s largest life insurance company agreed to pay the U.S. government more than $77 million for facilitating tax evasion, it arranged private placement life insurance policies for Russian oligarchs, leaked documents from @icij.org show. Read more: https://taxnotes.co/3XdFjUq