Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

About Professor Bainbridge

Stephen Bainbridge is the William D. Warren Professor of Law at UCLA, where he currently teaches Business Associations, Unincorporated Business Associations, and Advanced Corporation Law. In past years, he has also taught Corporate Finance, Securities Regulation, Mergers and Acquisitions, and seminars on corporate governance. Professor Bainbridge previously taught at the University of Illinois Law School (1988-1996), where the Class of 1990 gave him the “Best Instructor Award.” He has also taught at Harvard Law School as the Joseph Flom Visiting Professor of Law and Business (2000-2001), La Trobe University in Melbourne (2005 and 2007) and at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo (1999).

Professor Bainbridge is a prolific scholar, whose work covers a variety of subjects, but with a strong emphasis on the law and economics of public corporations. He has written over 50 law review articles, which have appeared in such leading journals as the Harvard Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the Stanford Law Review and the Vanderbilt Law Review. Bainbridge’s most recent books include: Business Associations: Cases and Materials on Agency, Partnerships, and Corporations (6th ed. 2006) (with Klein and Ramseyer); Agency, Partnerships, and Limited Liability Entities: Cases and Materials on Unincorporated Business Associations (2nd ed. 2007) (with Klein and Ramseyer); Agency, Partnerships & LLCs (2004); Corporation Law and Economics (2002); Securities Law-Insider Trading (1999).

From 1994 to 1996, Bainbridge was a Salvatori Fellow with the Heritage Foundation. Bainbridge currently serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Markets and Morality and the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society’s Corporations, Securities & Antitrust Practice Group.

About ProfessorBainbridge.com

ProfessorBainbridge.com has been transformed into a landing page that serves as a planet (a.k.a. hub) site for three content blogs:
—StephenBainbridge.com: A personal journal, focusing on politics and culture
—BusinessAssociationsBlog.com: A professional blog, focused on law and economics
—ProfessorBainbridgeOnWine.com: A wine and food blog

The magazine approach elicited some interesting comments. At Ann Althouse’s blog, Joan complained: “now he expects me to visit three different sites? “ (Actually, all Joan needs to do is to go to ProfessorBainbridge.com to see if there is anything of interest to her on any of sub-sites. In addition, each of the content blogs has sidebar feeds of headlines from the other content blogs. So there’s lots of links between the sites to help readers navigate the system.

Why split one reasonably successful, albeit hardly A-list, blog into three pieces? Wisconsin law professor and popular blogger Ann Althouse has devoted a lot of time to thinking about the way academics can incorporate blogging into their professional and personal lives, having written a number of thoughtful posts and essays on that subject. In commenting on my decision, Ann concluded that she prefers “one blog with mixed topics,” but she also understood why others might want a sharper division between professional and personal blogging:

I can see how someone else might prefer to highlight a topic (like wine) and to keep the professional part completely professional. It’s likely to be more comprehensible to colleagues, and there probably are some people who would only be interested in following you down one path but not the others. ...

Is Bainbridge’s way the way of the future? We shall see. It’s one way. I think it will appeal to some who blog a lot—most people can’t keep up three blogs—and who want to write about their professional subject in a style that they worry is not entertaining enough for lay readers or who want to maximize the credit they get for the professional writing they are doing on the blog. It may work as a way to get more of your colleagues to read your blog. Some of them probably don’t want to wade through the daily posts to see what you are writing about law.

Her analysis nailed my rationale. I’ve been reasonably successful using my blog as an adjunct to my scholarly agenda. Case in point: From Vice Chancellor Leo Strine’s opinion in Trenwick America Litigation Trust v. Ernst & Young, L.L.P.:

“In an incisive article and a thoughtful blog comment, Professor Bainbridge is critical of jurisprudence that expresses the view that directors owe fiduciary duties to the corporation itself, rather than a particular constituency of the corporation.” Trenwick America Litigation Trust v. Ernst & Young, L.L.P., 906 A.2d 168, 195 n.75 (Del. Ch. 2006) (emphasis supplied).

A number of judges and lawyers have told me they routinely read my blog to get my corporate law comments. These folks are the primary intended audience for my legal scholarship. Unlike a lot of legal academics, who write mainly for other academics, when I set down to write a law review article, the people I have in mind are judges and practicing lawyers. I want to persuade them.

My assumption - based on lots of conversations with members of my target audience - is that a professional blog focusing solely on technical legal analysis, without requiring the reader to wade through political opinions, wine reviews, and so on, will be more effective in reaching this target audience. Hence, I created the Business Associations Blog. These readers can bookmark that site and/or subscribe exclusively to that site’s feed. As such, I’ll be able to use this corner of my section of the blogosphere more effectively as an adjunct to my vocation.

Conversely, I also no longer have to worry that my generalist readers will get bored. After all, there was always something incongruous about going from a post that used the jargon of Oliver Williamson’s New Institutional Economics to analyze some aspect of corporate governance to a post about the comparative merits of white and black truffles.