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Brian Leiter reports:
Alas, another passing to report: Professor Schotland was emeritus at Georgetown and a leading election law expert. Rick Hasen (UC Irvine) has more.
Schotland was also active in corporate law. He notably launched a vicious attack on Henry Manne's insider trading theories in Roy Schotland, Unsafe at Any Price: A Reply to Manne “Insider Trading in the Stock Market,” 53 VA. L. REV. 1425 (1967). To which Manne responded in Insider Trading and the Law Professors, 23 Vanderbilt Law RevIew 547 (December 1969). Both are included in my Research Handbook on Insider Trading
Perhaps Schotland's greatest contribution to generations of academics, however, was his long and ultimately (partially) successful battle to force TIAA-CREF to reform some of its more egregiously anti-competitive and paternalistic policies. Although he was only partially successful in unwinding TIAA-CREF's absurdly restrictive practices, all of us who suffer at TIAA-CREF's hands suffer a bit less due to his dogged perserverance.
Here's his WaPo obituary:
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Professor Schotland served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan and was an associate with the New York firm Paul, Weiss. He then taught law at the University of Virginia and University of Pennsylvania before moving to Georgetown University Law Center as a professor and associate dean. He was the co-editor of Administrative Law, Cases and Comments (9th ed., 1995). Other writings included: Conflicts of Interest in the Securities Markets (ed.), Divergent Investing of Pension Assets, Campaign Financing of Elective Judges, and Proposals for Campaign Finance Reform. He consulted for the Federal Reserve Board, Congressional committees, state pension systems, the Government of Bermuda, and the ABA on campaign finance. He was a member of the American Law Institute and Senior Advisor to the National Center for State Courts. He worked on several reform efforts: the TIAA-CREF pension system, judicial elections, and judges' pay. In addition to his work, his interests included: reading mysteries and Ancient Greek plays, listening to music, going to art museums, traveling, and spending time with friends and family.
A review in today's WSJ prompted me to order The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most Progressive Era
The history of that era has rarely if ever been as well told as it is in Douglas R. Egerton's forcefully argued and crisply written "The Wars of Reconstruction." Mr. Egerton presents a sometimes inspiring but more often deeply shocking story that reveals the nation at its best and worst, when newly freed slaves and idealists, both black and white, struggled heroically against pitiless white terrorism to preserve the rights that Union armies had won on the battlefield and that Republican members of Congress affirmed in the years after the war.
Mr. Egerton, a history professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., and the author of "Year of Meteors," a first-rate account of the 1860 election, asks us to see Reconstruction not as bad policy further doomed by corruption and incompetence but as a profoundly forward-looking program that was subverted by organized violence. ...
Although defenders of the old South will doubtless disagree, Mr. Egerton makes a compelling case that American society as a whole would have benefited mightily had Reconstruction been permitted to fulfill its early promise. In particular, it would have saved the U.S. from the long Jim Crow agony of racial repression and the distortion of national politics by the South's determination to protect segregation at any price. ...
The author remedies a particularly glaring deficit in our memory. He shows that black officeholders in the early Reconstruction era—demeaned by many pro-Southern historians and portrayed as lascivious buffoons by fictionalizers such as Thomas Dixon Jr., whose novels became the basis for "Birth of a Nation"—were substantial citizens well-prepared to govern. They had often risen from a middle class of ministers and businessmen that existed in antebellum America beyond the view of racist whites. By the turn of the 20th century, however, once-effective biracial coalitions across the South had been destroyed and black voters almost completely disenfranchised through physical intimidation and electoral trickery. White supremacists took control in all the former Confederate states.
The failure of Reconstruction remains a stain on our national soul. It is well to remember that hard fact.
Dr Paul Fryer reviews the Research Handbook on Insider Trading
This handbook, edited by Stephen M. Bainbridge, Professor of Law at the University of Californi, is designed to provide a broad overview of research focusing on insider trading, predominantly in the United States but also offer global perspectives from Asia, Australasia, and Europe. It also seeks to provide an additional dimension by critically examining some of more challenging and under-explored aspects of financial crime. ...
This research handbook is, in parts, highly innovative with chapters that focus on areas not generally associated with insider trading activities, such as gender and the impact of social media activities. However, the vast majority of chapters focus on "nuts and bolts" issues that academics and practitioners in this field with be familiar with. Stephen Bainbridge and his contributors have produced a valuable reference source for scholars and practitioners of corporate law who wish to gain a greater understanding of insider trading.
