…then exhuming it, without a court order, in time for The Big Finish.
- If you really need proof that markets are not a panacaea — any more than antidepressants, for that matter — consider barriers to actual provision of care erected by the ("market-oriented") insurance industry. Which, in the core sense, isn't "insurance" at all, but is instead an implicit cost-sharing mechanism with exhorbitant losses to friction.
- After all, markets work best with competition. Well, perhaps not so much for economists (or lawyers). This has some predictable negative externalities.
- Speaking of negative externalities, I'm not in mourning for this one. Financially, B&N has been dominated by real-estate speculation issues for decades (including, but far from limited to, strong-arm lease arbitrage back to the early 1990s)… and bad taste long before that.
- I've been pondering this suggestion for changing legal education's focus and methodology for a month now, trying to come up with a pithy comment. I can't: I agree with part of the conclusion (that reinvention is necessary) and disagree completely with the suggested means. For American lawyers, anyway, the biggest impediment to change in the legal profession is state licensing, regulation, and acculturation of lawyers — and the irony that legal education, for at least the last half-century, has focused on federal and default/consensus-national state law appears to have escaped just about everyone.
This is particularly annoying (speaking politely) when one's practice focuses on federal law; when one's client base is scattered across the nation; and conversely when one's opponents are anything but scattered, but definitely not local. And it's all mandated by law that disputes in that field — that specialty (RPC 7.2 be damned) — be heard only in federal court… unless there's an arbitration clause, which is also a federal-law thingy (even when heard in a state court). Let's not look too closely at who benefits from nonuniform procedural requirements, either… or consider who actually benefits from choice-of-forum and choice-of-law principles. When you signed up with that cellular carrier, did you have the option to establish venue where you are and choose your own state's contract and consumer-protection law? How about when you bought that computer — these days, tablet or cell phone — over the 'net?
I'm just not going to trudge into utterly predictable state disciplinary failings and established-Bar trade protectionism today. But I certainly could… This isn't federalism, or states as democracy's laboratory; this is Balkanization that ultimately encourages people like this guy (PDF)… and this one, demonstrating that the "laboratories" give undemocratic results absent effective democracy (a predictable result of a "two-party system" that inherently enforces false-dilemma-dominated reasoning).
So, Mr Jordan: Changing the education system won't help (much), and will be pretty illusory anyway, so long as the actual practice structure — and control over it — remains stuck in the sixties. The 1860s.
Prospective autocrats, you'd better hurry: Only seventy shopping days left to buy the captive politician of your dreams! Or at least enough gunpowder to make for an excellent bonfire.