In his characteristically wise contribution to the Stuntz conference, Mike Seidman posed the question of why so many of Bill’s influential criminal procedure articles make no references to the Bible or Christianity. Why, he asks, do they look so much like articles written by non-Christian scholars?

The Dodd Bill—the financial reform package currently under consideration in the Senate—is a sterling illustration of the old cliché that sometimes it's worse to miss by an inch than a mile. The provisions for handling large financial institution failures have progressed a great deal from last summer’s Obama administration proposal. They borrow a lot more from the bankruptcy laws, for instance. And there’s a lot of tough talk about ending too big to fail and harsh medicine for large financial institutions that stumble. But the framework has more than enough wiggle room for bank regulators to bail out creditors as they did in 2008, and it gives them a $50 billion pot of cash to do it with.  The end result is as bad, and could even be worse, than the original, for reasons described in more detail in this op-ed from a couple of days ago.

The earlier link to the conference should now have the video.  It's right here.

And here is an article from the Weekly Standard on the conference.

I remember the moment when I realized that Goldman had gone from being the darling of Wall Street—the firm everyone pointed to as the best run, with the best internal risk controls—to something very different. Last summer, in response to a little piece I wrote for a New York Times Dealbook blog discussion, a commentator referred to Goldman as the embodiment of evil, or something to that effect. I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. Within a few weeks, I began to understand, as rumors surfaced about Goldman profiting from its customers’ subprime losses and being a multibillion dollar beneficiary of the government’s AIG bailout.

Many many years ago, while I was in law school, I took a poetry workshop with Charles Wright.  He was already a well-known poet then, and he's subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize and many other awards.  In addition to being a superb poet (the critic Helen Vendler recently described him as one of America's major poets) and a true gentlemen, he's also quite funny.  Here is a little interview culled from a conversation I had with him a few months ago: skeel-charles-wright-interview.pdf

Here's a bit of information about Wright and one of his poems. 

I’m lousy with predictions, especially when they involve presidents or Supreme Court justices, but here goes: I predict President Obama will hint widely that he plans to nominate Diane Wood (the main Protestant in the running), but actually nominate Elena Kagan.

With the financial reform bill now in the full Senate and all signs pointing toward its passing in the next week or two, a flurry of possible amendments are circulating privately and publicly. Which are most important? Not Senator Boxer’s new amendment, which would explicitly state that large financial institutions must be liquidated if they are subject to the proposed resolution procedures for “systemically important” financial institutions. Senator Boxer’s claim that this would prove that the bill doesn’t allow future bailouts illustrates an understandable but dangerous confusion about what a bailout is. If all of an institution’s creditors are paid in full, it’s a bailout even if the institution itself is eventually liquidated. If creditors know they’ll be paid—and they can be under the proposed bill—they’ll be too willing to lend to the institution and won’t monitor as carefully as they would if they would if they weren’t protected. They’ll act like the creditors of Bear, Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers did.