AALS Section on Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services

The section program at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools in San Francisco on January 7 this year focused on the "post-crisis" landscape. The Call for Papers panel featured papers by William Birdthistle, Jim Hawkins, Adam Levitin, Alan White and Sarah Woo.

One of my favorites on this panel was James Hawkins' (University of Houston) paper on Regulating the Fringe: Reexamining the Link Between Fringe Banking and Financial Distress forthcoming in the Indiana Law Review. Basically Jim argues that products like payday loans, pawn loans, and rent-to-own leases— might not cause as much financial distress to consumers because of the finality involved in these transactions and the amount. As such, perhaps we might reconsider whether regulators should lump these types of transactions with others. At the heart of this is what constitutes financial distress. While I am not a fan of the fringe banking products, Jim's argument that they might require differing treatment in terms of regulation is worth serious consideration. For my part, I part with him in some of the ideas regarding monetary valuation. I remain unconvinced that one person's financial distress is the same as another's due to relative economic means as a whole. For instance, a person of very limited means may experience serious financial distress when their $750 auto is repossessed and they cannot get to work, then loose their employment, etc. While the event of losing the car may have a finality in and of itself that does not continue to plague the consumer, even smaller dollar transactions can have great impact on the lives of many consumers. That aside, the finality of the transaction is worth further thought when considering regulation of fringe banking products, as is the differing impact of the size of these transactions.

- JSM

From the World of Law Reviews: Game Theory and Law Review Submissions

As the height of the law review submission season is coming to a close, I thought I would observe an interesting approach by a law review editorial board and some other general observations.

Law Reviews Gaming it Up. The editors at the University of Cincinnati Law Review, who will ultimately publish my piece on fixtures Groping Along between Things Real and things personal, engaged in a nice piece of behavioral prediction in making the offer to publish. In the offer letter the editors offered two choices: (1) I could expedite with anyone over the next two days; or (2) I could expedite with only the top 30 law reviews over the next 10 days. This strategy is genius from the law review editor standpoint. First, its highly likely that the reviews most likely to take the piece out from under Cincinnati are those ranked between 31 and 51. The strategy by Cincinnati reduces to almost near absurdity the time frame for journals to respond. On the

other hand, if they are likely to lose an article to a top 30 journal, then 10 days will likely not be needed for that decision to reveal itself. This is the kind of law review gamesmanship that I like and support! Has anyone else seen an offer like this before?

Lex Opus is a good secondary alternative to Bepress's Expresso. In some ways, the system operates just a smoothly. Another feature that I liked was Lex Opus allows law reviews to view the work sua sponte and make the author an offer -- I received one offer that was not unattractive. That seems to me to be a pretty good idea and, though I imagine that such offers are rarely accepted, it is still a nice feature. But the best feature is its cost -- its free.
Peer Review of General Law Review Articles. Brian Leiter this morning posted a link to PRSM -- A consortium of law reviews engaging peer review processes. Journals that have signed on to the consortium include The South Carolina Law Review, The Mississippi Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, and the Wake Forest Law Review. It will be curious to see if this is successful.

Marc (MLR)