99th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance

Title: The Principles and Practice of the Law of Nations Building

Date: March 9, 2012

Time: 6 to 8pm

Venue: University of Westminster, Regent Campus, Room 516

For the 99th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance, the senior members of the group will provide a workshop for LLM students on the principles and practices of researching and writing dissertations that matter. Too many times students think that dissertations are just an exercise of extravagant futility, and of course, with that sort of attitude, the opportunity to learn and do something exciting and meaningful with one's life is just wasted. To have the right attitude towards one's work affects social change towards what Plato called "social comity."

Lots of postgraduates in law and finance having incurred gigantic fees and not being able to get an appropriate high flying job may feel they are victim of that which they may have studied as a pernicious phenomenon of the central banking political elite protectionist racket, namely, a Ponzi scheme. Despite these rather obvious abhorrent facts in our current Anglo-American-European where in America student loans are a trillion plus dollar bubble and in the UK where our dear former PM led the ultimate sacrificial Neo-religious cult into War and "education, education, education," I think it would be good to step back and try to figure out WHY WE DO RESEARCH.

To make this session a bit more of a learning by performance space, each student will be asked to read a few lines of Plato's Laws and provide an INTERPRETATION of such. This simple ancient way of learning may give us just the right excuse to develop THEORIES and THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS that matter to our lives.

Joe

99th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance

Becoming a Cosmopolitan Lawyer

Peter Lederer and I have revised our paper, "Becoming a Cosmopolitan Lawyer". It's available at SSRN here.

The paper is based on extensive interviews that Peter and I have done over a few years. It is presented as an oral history--rather different to anything I've done before.

Comments most welcome.

Becoming a Cosmopolitan Lawyer

Will There Be Fallout from Clementi?

I've revised, updated and expanded my paper, "Will There Be Fallout from Clementi? The Repercussions for the Legal Profession after the Legal Services Act 2007". It's available from SSRN here.

I have sketched out some of the new types of business that are now being promoted under the Alternative Business Structure regime which came into force in January 2012. There have been over 130 licence applications to the SRA. And don't forget the first ABS was approved by the Licensed Conveyancers last October.

What the legal services landscape will look like say five or ten years from now is anybody's guess. It's wide open.

Say goodbye to the legal profession and welcome the legal services providers......

Will There Be Fallout from Clementi?

98th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance

Title: Otium cum Dignitatus ["retirement with dignity"]

Date: Friday, March 2, 2012

Time: 6 to 8pm

Where: University of Westminster, 319 Regent Street, room 516

Drinks +/- Dinner afterwards [I suggest long stem cocktails at the Langham Hotel where world class hookers, Russian and Saudi billionaires mingle with diplomats and BBC personalities -- hey, this scene is right next door to the Uni.]

For the 98th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance, we will engage the poetry of Horace to countervail the idiocies of socialism, capitalism and fascism found in the rhetorical arguments of propagandists, especially, those now advocating war with Iran "for the good of XYZ." Please note the Horatian Odes are gifts to the permanent world culture and if you haven't read them, then I pity you because they say quite precisely what is the attitude of a genuinely civilised, moral and critical heart in the face of an over-weaning violent state. Horace is in a class of the best of the best and can change your attitude with a couple words.

In our examination of the meaning of a few Odes, we will also delve into the concept of "theoretical system" as a "presentation-INVARIANCE" stated in a very original manner by Professor Jean-Marie Marquis (2009) From A Geometrical Point of View, A History and Philosophy of Category Theory. Marquis by the way has done us a great service by writing about the most abstruse mathematics in a way to show their relevance to how we can literally turn sketches ["esquisses"] of radical reconstructions of seemingly disparate facts into integrated totality structures. His writing is graceful, precise and tingly as only philosophers feel about philosophical arguments. It's a "Whole in One." To be a bit more precise, we can move from sketches to abstract logical relations, to complicated ontologies, with the ease of paring finger nails! It's a doodle and the doodle rigorously defines the space! From the theoretical systems which we will illustrate with morphisms and functors to the New World Order, we will also examine "the smart-violent gene" hypothesis of Potts and Hayden (2008) Sex and War. 

If you have time, please bring a parallel translation of Horace.

ciao
Joe 

98th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance

What Is Fitness for Purpose?

(thanks to law-services.org.uk)
These are becoming heady days for the legal profession, or rather, I should say "authorized legal services providers" as we may well see lawyers as we've known them become a minority group. The last two months have seen all kinds of new ventures starting under the new ABS regime--BT Claims, Riverview Law, Co-operative Legal Services, Legal365.com, Rocket Lawyer, Slater & Gordon (taking over Russell Jones & Walker)--to name a few.

Today the Legal Services Board and the Legal Services Institute held the first in a series of seminars on "Education and Training: Getting Fit for 2012 Session 1: The Removal of Barriers". Stephen Mayson introduced the seminar by telling the audience how rapidly the legal services market was changing and his list of the last two months' changes was far more extensive than mine. As he put it, "We are seeing the most profound change in the separation of the legal profession from the legal services market. The two are no longer coterminous." The result is that legal education and training (leaving aside the joke that is continuing professional development) are no longer fully fit for purpose.

The speakers, in addition to Stephen, included David Edmonds (chairman of the LSB), Stephen Denyer (global markets partner at Allen & Overy), and Rosemary Evans (legal education consultant). Rather than describe what each speaker said, I prefer to draw out two of the themes: globalization and regulatory standards. Let me say that after this group had said their pieces, the discussion was intense and extensive. We could have easily gone beyond the allotted two hours.

Globalization: There was clear recognition that English law and lawyers are firmly situated in a global legal market. Stephen Denyer pointed out how within A&O only 40% of the lawyers were UK-qualified. Furthermore, he now works "with hundreds of lawyers who are dually-qualified, and scores who are triply-qualified."

It's clear the English legal qualification now suffers in comparison with the New York Bar qualification. It is the de facto global legal qualification. As Nigel Savage and I have argued before, the structure of English legal qualifications--degree, vocational learning, training contract--impedes the route to qualification rather than open it up. I've tried to put this in as stark terms as I can (based on a report I did for the LSB on the global context of legal education).

It is not that UK legal education is bad per se but rather we need to redesign it for a multiplex world and legal marketplace.

Regulatory Standards: If legal education and training are to be redesigned what would they look like and who would be the recipients? Given the range of potential providers of legal services, we can't necessarily rely on a single entry route. We belong in the polycentric camp--many paths.

John Randall, one of the authors of the Legal Services Institute paper, "Reforming Legal Education", remarked that the qualification is important because that's where regulation starts. Rosemary Evans emphasized this by arguing for legal education to encompass more work-based experience and be expansive.

This next point is going to be hard for conventional lawyers to grasp. It's that we have moved to outcomes-focussed measures in our regulatory schemas. So if we accept that there are many paths into the legal services market, they must have the same outcomes measures and there must be mutual recognition. Much of the legal profession and also legal education has relied on status measures (often implicit) rather than objective measurable criteria. Changing this way requires much soul-searching for parts of the legal profession because, to go back to the start, they are no longer the only constituents of the legal services market.

My final two thoughts on this are that the European Commission is presently researching the operation of the Establishment Directive with a view to moving away from vertical differentiation between professions to a horizontal measure that will group all professions (eg, lawyers, hairdressers, engineers) together as cognate groups. Lawyers will no longer be a special group.

The US model of legal education, flawed as it is, is enjoying a remarkable export market to civil law countries and those that used to follow the English model.

Now one reason for this seminar series is to inform the Legal Education and Training Review and to them I extend my deepest sympathies as they plunge into this quagmire.

What Is Fitness for Purpose?

97th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance - Civilisation and Its Class-A Discontents

Title: Civilisation and Its Class-A Discontents
Date:  February 17, 2012
Time:  6 to 8pm
Venue: room 516, 319 Regent Street, University of Westminster
Dinner:  Thai or Persian or Just Drinks Depending 

Le Menu

For the 97th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance, we will examine the quasi-Freudian concept of CIVILISATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS through three and a half lenses:

(1) The Myth of the High Flyer 

      (a) Please play and meditate on the morphisms, functors and categories implied by:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6REtT0B1VA&feature=youtube_gdata_player) 

(2) The Myth of Financialisation via Securitization

     (a) Kettering, K.C. (2008) Securitization and Its  Discontents, The Dynamics of Financial Product Development, at:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1012937

     (b) Went, P. (2011) Securitization and Its Discontents, at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1888410

(3) The Myth of Western Civilisation via The Koan of Bafflement

     (a) Denuding the Delusions of Complexification, see Jon Jandai (3 August 2011) Life is Easy, at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21j_OCNLuYg&feature=youtube_gdata_player

(3.5) The Half-Myth of Socialism

     (a) On the homotopy of socialism or why socialists such as President Obama believe Hopium Overrides Arithmetic, see:   http://www.zerohedge.com/news/biderman-beyond-baffled-bos-budget
     
After this opetopic journey (the combining of the many into the One), we will adjourn to a nearby restaurant for a meal and some refreshments.  

ciao
joe

97th Session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance - Civilisation and Its Class-A Discontents

96th session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance (Friday 20, 6-8pm, Room 516, Regent Campus, University of Westminster)

Dear All,

For the 96^th session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance I am taking the stage to share with you some thoughts that are related to my research on the intermediated holding system. Don't be put off by the term since I am very keen to spare you the technicalities of it and of an entire system that lies underneath. Instead I am planning to discuss with you a paper from Robert K. Merton, one of the most famous sociologists of the 20^th century, entitled the Unanticipated Consequences of the Purposeful Social Actions, a subject with which Merton become obsessed for the years to follow. As one of most impressive bits, Merton wrote this very simple but at the same time clear and challenging paper (influenced by Frank H. Knight) in 1936, still fresh from his graduation. After 76 years the Mertonian factors that lead to the unanticipated consequences remain unchallenged while inexplicably his impact on the legal theories appears to be weak.

During the session I will focus on the five categories of factors that according to Merton lead to the unanticipated consequences of the purposeful social actions i.e. (i) the lack of knowledge (ignorance), (ii) the error, (iii) the imperious immediacy of interest, (iv) the basic values, and (v) the self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecy. These categories appear to encapsulate many later findings from different sciences, but from the economics and its branch of the behavioural economics. I would even speculate that the above categories can be translated into asymmetries such as (i) the information asymmetry (developed by Akerlof and Spitzer to name a few), (ii) the perception asymmetry (e.g. due to emotional or cognitive biases, mostly developed by the behavioural economics and psychology), (iii) the interest asymmetry (e.g. the self-serving bias of bureaucrats, the capture theory, mostly developed by the neoclassical economists), (iv) the belief asymmetry (e.g. self-destructive blind belief in ideologies or fundamentals without recognition of their limits) and (v) the persuasion asymmetry (e.g. herd behaviour).  

I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on the above and would be very pleased if we can turn this session into a challenging but also entertaining discussion. 

Regards, Rezi

96th session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance (Friday 20, 6-8pm, Room 516, Regent Campus, University of Westminster)